the summit of a bizarrely exposed ridge. It was isolated in one sense, but at the same time it was the middle house of a terrace of three cottages. When I first moved there both the other two houses were holiday homes, used only at weekends, so the neighbours created little disruption and, indeed, were immensely helpful as I struggled to learn how to live in such a cold, wind-driven location (drain your pipes before you leave home).
From both the front and the back there were enormously long views. Because of the steep sides of the dale, Stanhope, three kilometres and nearly 250 metres below, was invisible; the view stretched straight over the valley to the moors the other side. At night there were pairs of sharp eyes looking at me – the headlights of cars six miles away, coming over from Teesdale, and shining clean across the valley and in through my bedroom window.
But my house on the hill was not some shepherd’s cottage or ancient hermitage. It was part of a major industrial complex. From the earliest times Weardale has been a hive of industrial activity. One of the largest caches of Bronze Age artefacts in the UK was discovered beside the Heathery Burn, between my house and Stanhope. The Romans did not use the A68 (Dere Street), which still runs along the eastern edge of the Durham moors, solely to march troops up to Hadrian’s Wall, but also to take the lead and silver from the hill mines down to York. Lead, silver, feldspar, tin and coal were all mined uphere, and during the Industrial Revolution of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Weardale became a crucial source of lead and feldspar, which were mined under extraordinarily exploitative and dangerous conditions. In 1834 a railway was opened to bring lead down from the scattered hill mines to the dale itself, then out to the factories on the coastal plain. The sides of the dale were too steep for the trains to climb and a double steam winch was installed to pull them up. The winch engines needed steam twenty-four hours a day, so a line of cottages was built for the winch engineers. Farm labourers’ cottages were exquisitely cantilevered in to the landscape to provide them with as much shelter as possible, but the engineers were ruthlessly exposed to the full effect of the elements, 425 metres above sea level, on the very crest of a hill. My house was an ex-winch engineer’s cottage.
The ruin of the engine house itself stood derelict a hundred yards from the cottages. There is no winch, no railway and no mining now. The cement factory at Eastgate closed while I was there and the sand quarry beside the old railway line will no doubt follow it. There are no industrial jobs in Weardale, and the machinery and social life of the miners is silenced. But the views of apparently desolate and wild hills have been carved and shaped and constructed and formed by that industrial past. This is ‘Famous Five’ country 1 because for every fog there is a mysterious mine shaft and for every bog a deserted railway line. The moors are a place of adventure.
At the same time the area is rich in the artefacts of the hermit tradition of northern England – Durham itself, Hexham, Lindisfarne (Holy Island) and a scattering of stones that mark erstwhile chapels and hermitages. In fact, the radical politics of the north-east drew its inspiration from the great hermit Bishop Cuthbert. At the end of the eleventh century, the inhabitants of the north-east resisted William the Conqueror’s demands for feudal dues and Norman reorganisation. Their land, they claimed, was the patrimony of St Cuthbert, unalienable, freely given and held. The habit of stubborn resistance has marked most of English history.
There are not many places you can live within such a long history and still have the huge silences and beauty of it all. The dales are full of stories and the vanished silent ghosts of other lives lived very differently in the same place. The emptiness of these moors is not the
From both the front and the back there were enormously long views. Because of the steep sides of the dale, Stanhope, three kilometres and nearly 250 metres below, was invisible; the view stretched straight over the valley to the moors the other side. At night there were pairs of sharp eyes looking at me – the headlights of cars six miles away, coming over from Teesdale, and shining clean across the valley and in through my bedroom window.
But my house on the hill was not some shepherd’s cottage or ancient hermitage. It was part of a major industrial complex. From the earliest times Weardale has been a hive of industrial activity. One of the largest caches of Bronze Age artefacts in the UK was discovered beside the Heathery Burn, between my house and Stanhope. The Romans did not use the A68 (Dere Street), which still runs along the eastern edge of the Durham moors, solely to march troops up to Hadrian’s Wall, but also to take the lead and silver from the hill mines down to York. Lead, silver, feldspar, tin and coal were all mined uphere, and during the Industrial Revolution of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Weardale became a crucial source of lead and feldspar, which were mined under extraordinarily exploitative and dangerous conditions. In 1834 a railway was opened to bring lead down from the scattered hill mines to the dale itself, then out to the factories on the coastal plain. The sides of the dale were too steep for the trains to climb and a double steam winch was installed to pull them up. The winch engines needed steam twenty-four hours a day, so a line of cottages was built for the winch engineers. Farm labourers’ cottages were exquisitely cantilevered in to the landscape to provide them with as much shelter as possible, but the engineers were ruthlessly exposed to the full effect of the elements, 425 metres above sea level, on the very crest of a hill. My house was an ex-winch engineer’s cottage.
The ruin of the engine house itself stood derelict a hundred yards from the cottages. There is no winch, no railway and no mining now. The cement factory at Eastgate closed while I was there and the sand quarry beside the old railway line will no doubt follow it. There are no industrial jobs in Weardale, and the machinery and social life of the miners is silenced. But the views of apparently desolate and wild hills have been carved and shaped and constructed and formed by that industrial past. This is ‘Famous Five’ country 1 because for every fog there is a mysterious mine shaft and for every bog a deserted railway line. The moors are a place of adventure.
At the same time the area is rich in the artefacts of the hermit tradition of northern England – Durham itself, Hexham, Lindisfarne (Holy Island) and a scattering of stones that mark erstwhile chapels and hermitages. In fact, the radical politics of the north-east drew its inspiration from the great hermit Bishop Cuthbert. At the end of the eleventh century, the inhabitants of the north-east resisted William the Conqueror’s demands for feudal dues and Norman reorganisation. Their land, they claimed, was the patrimony of St Cuthbert, unalienable, freely given and held. The habit of stubborn resistance has marked most of English history.
There are not many places you can live within such a long history and still have the huge silences and beauty of it all. The dales are full of stories and the vanished silent ghosts of other lives lived very differently in the same place. The emptiness of these moors is not the
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