The priory began in 1145 as a house of Augustinian canons, founded by Roger de Mowbray on land that William the Conqueror had granted to his ancestor Robert de Mowbray after the Conquest. For nearly four centuries it functioned quietly as a monastery in the rolling country south of the Hambletons, a stop on royal progresses - Margaret Tudor spent the night of 17 July 1503 here as a guest of the prior on her way north to marry James IV of Scotland. The Dissolution ended that quiet in 1538. In 1539 Anthony de Bellasis, a royal chaplain who had personally helped Henry VIII shut down nine northern monasteries including this one, bought it from the crown for 1,062 pounds. His nephew Sir William Bellasis converted the priory into a private residence in 1546, and the Bellasis family stayed for nearly three centuries.

Mary Cromwell, Oliver's third daughter, married Thomas Belasyse - heir to the Fauconberg title - in 1657. When Cromwell died the following year, he was buried at Westminster Abbey. Two years later, after the Restoration, his corpse was disinterred, hanged at Tyburn, and beheaded. The body was supposedly thrown into a pit beneath the gallows. The story at Newburgh is that Mary smuggled her father's remains north and had them sealed into a brick vault in the attic. Charles II's officials would not look in the attic of a viscount's house. The skull, taken from Tyburn and used variously as a curiosity, a stage prop, and a relic, was eventually buried at Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge in 1960. The body, according to the family, is still here. Or it never was. Either answer is consistent with three hundred years of polite refusal.

The Bellasis line ended in 1825 when Lady Charlotte Bellayse died without a male heir. The estate passed to her nephew, Sir George Wombwell, 3rd Baronet, and the Wombwells have held it ever since. The most famous of them, Sir George Orby Wombwell, the 4th Baronet, rode in the Charge of the Light Brigade at Balaclava in 1854 and somehow came back. He served as High Sheriff of Yorkshire in 1861 and lived to tell stories about the valley of death that Tennyson wrote into legend. The present house wraps around the priory's medieval bones - the 16th-century shell remodelled by the 4th Viscount Fauconberg between 1725 and 1745, restored again in the 1960s. Forty acres of gardens stretch around it: water gardens, walled gardens, topiary yews carved into shapes that have been clipped every summer for two hundred years.

Newburgh sits just outside the village of Coxwold, four miles east of the A19 between Easingwold and Thirsk. It is privately owned and open to the public only on limited days through the summer - which is part of how the legends stay alive. You can walk the grounds. You can stand in the great hall. The guide will take you upstairs and stop, eventually, in front of a closed-off section of wall and tell you the story without ever quite saying it is true. The local pheasant collieries that once worked the estate are silent now; the cricketers who play in the village green below are descendants of generations who knew the family. A house full of secrets in a quiet village in the southern edge of the moors - whether or not the secret is a real one almost stops mattering.