It was in the early months of 1838. Six boys and a man of Kirdford saw the New Year in but never saw the Spring. Five of them were stable boys on a farm, and they slept in one of the cottages, still standing. They slept in one room, and on the bitter winter's night of January 21, 1838, they lit a fire to keep them warm.

An old man at the gate when we called remembered hearing his neighbours talk of what happened. There were no chimneys, he said, and the rest of the story is eloquent in the words the villagers put on the stone; these five boys went to sleep and did not wake, dying "from having placed green wood ashes in their bedroom."

Those were the good old days when a Grace Darling could die of consumption from sleeping in a room without an open window; these poor stable boys died from sleeping in a room without a chimney.

They were not yet in their graves when a man on the farm fell from his horse and was killed, and they laid these six together in a common grave.

Seven weeks of sorrowful memory passed in this little place, and one of the carts of the farm passed over a boy of 14 and killed him too. They laid him with the rest, these seven together, closing the chapter of the saddest seven weeks that surely any farm has ever known.

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