Drewton's Newsletter

History Lesson

Some may wonder why we named our restaurant ‘Kitchen’?  The answer … we wanted to honour a certain group of people which settled here many moons ago, known as the Romans!  Our Farm Shop and Restaurant sits on an old Roman kitchen site, adjacent to the A1034 which is still listed as an old Roman road.  The kitchen catered for the Roman settlement situated within The Drewton Estate which was then known as ‘Druids Town’.

Drewton is a hamlet in the East Riding of Yorkshire, England. It is situated six miles south-east from Market Weighton and eleven miles west from Hull city centre, and forms part of the civil parish of South Cave.

In the 1086 Domesday Book Drewton is written as “Drowetone”. The manor, in the East Riding Hundreds of Cave, comprised 11 households, 6 villagers and 5 smallholders, with 2 ploughlands.

The Domesday settlement at Drewton became a partly deserted medieval village, possibly at the time of the 14th-century Black Death. There was a further decline in the second half of the 17th century leaving only Drewton Manor and a farmhouse. Four houses were added in the mid-20th century.  A later Drewton Manor, built in stone about 1850 includes residential buildings, gardens, and a working farm.

At Drewton, there is a naturally formed stone monolith called St Austin’s Stone.  The huge monolith was supposed to be connected with Druid worship, and as the place where Saint Augustine preached to the Saxons, although there is no existing record of the saint ever visiting.  Legend told how it “derived its name from St. Augustine, who used to preach from this stone to the heathen, before Britain became christian.”  This obviously supplanted an earlier heathen site, but it’s difficult to work out what that may have been. 

The settlement was also the location of the old South Cave railway station on the Hull and Barnsley Railway, first used in 1885 for rail traffic after the huge construction project was completed by around 8,000 men, known as navvies.  This is now disused and strictly closed to any public access.  Tunnels were cut through chalk with linings being a mix of bar chalk walls and brick.  Drewton Tunnel is one of the longest disused tunnels in the United Kingdom at a length of 1 mile 354 yards, and lies to the east of the shorter Sugar Loaf Tunnel and Weedley Tunnel.

The western portal of Drewton Tunnel is almost entirely buried with landfill and is situated in an operating chalk quarry. This end of the tunnel has considerable deposits of mud on the former track bed washed in by rainfall as a result of local quarrying operations. The eastern portal remains open although is protected, and also strictly out of bounds. The tunnel regularly experiences chalk falls as the lining inside deteriorates in the damp conditions.

Jumping to the present time, and proud of her surroundings, Katie Taylor MBE opened Drewton’s Farm Shop in October 2010, sensitively converting old farm buildings on The Drewtons Estate, located on the edge of the Wolds Way.  Drewton’s sources food and drink products from around 250 Yorkshire-based farmers, growers, producers and suppliers, offering a wide choice of products in the farm shop and a whole host of seasonal dishes on the menus, across both Kitchen and The Manor Rooms.  The business supports a further 200 other professional companies in the region, which provide us with everything from design and marketing to suppliers for The Manor Rooms’ weddings and events venue, including entertainers, florists, photographers and room stylists.