Hello. I’ve been to see some old trains. I thought you might like to hear about it.
The Tanfield Railway likes to brand itself as “the
world’s oldest railway”, operating since 1725. It’s the sort of boast that tends to come with
asterisks attached, but it’s worded specifically enough that i think it might just be true.
Is it the world’s first railway? Not by a long shot. The use of wheels in rails for
transport goes back to the 1550s in Germany, and it was introduced to Britain soon thereafter. If
you want to be really pernickety, you could even go back to ancient Greece, where a grooved
Díolcos carried sea vessels over the
inconvenient Isthmus of Corinth.
Is it the world’s oldest passenger railway? Heavens, no — Wales’ Oystermouth Railway
started carrying passengers over by horse in 1807, and the Stockton and Darlington let them aboard
its steam trains from 1833, whereas the Tanfield wouldn’t begin its (short-lived) passenger
operations until 1842.
But… It is, as far as i can tell, the oldest physical stretch of
(non-funicular) railway in the
world which regularly carries trains today. Which seems good enough.
I snatched my tickets for the very last day of the operating season, when they were holding their
big “gala” event, so if you’re hoping to use this as a visitor’s guide then this post will be
utterly unhelpful, sorry. We started our day at East Tanfield, with a vintage bus parked outside, a
nice little café, and some live tunes in the reception area courtesy of
the Cloth Cappers.
I don’t think i’d ever seen so many flat caps in one place before stepping out onto the platform.
While we all waited for a train to arrive, kids and anoraks alike were entranced on the bay platform
by Horden, a canny green
National Coal Board locomotive making a right show of tooting its horn and puffing away, even if it
didn’t have anywhere to go at the moment:
At last, our train arrived, pulled by a wartime loco
rebuilt à la Thésée, and i, for my part, shuffled into third class like a good little plebeian. It was a strange mix
of cramped and spacious — you get your own little compartment, leaving you free to sprawl wide open
if noöne else is in there with you, but it’s easy to imagine people must have been packed in there
like sardines back in the day. We sailed past the Causey Arch without stopping, before a brief stop
at Andrews House (where i’d be doubling back later) and a subsequent slow ride to the terminus at
Sunniside.
Alas, the terminus isn’t particularly photogenic, and there’s not much to see, but it did let me get
a good shot of the British Railways badge on the locomotive as it prepared to turn around:
Back at Andrews House is the line’s most substantial station, a cute little cottage featuring a
footbridge for easy trainspotting, another café, and, most salivatingly, a used bookshop
specialising in trains, trains, and nothing but the trains.1
Obviously, then, i dashed straight in, and after a long conversation with an old man in a jacket who
might have been a volunteer or might have just been a fellow nerd, left with three books on the
railways that became the Tyne and Wear Metro for just £10. (I’m sure this purchase will provide me
much fodder for future blog posts, if i can ever be bothered to write them.)
Finally, just up the hill from there, we find the Marley Hill depot, where trains are fixed up and
any old railway artifacts that couldn’t find a better home are stashed. I’m fond of this big British
Coal banner myself, because, really, the miners have always deserved their own pride flag too:
On the parking lot between, all sorts of doohickeys were on display, from a vintage steamroller to
an army of old preserved buses, for those who like their transport heritage more on the road-going
side. The fine people at the
North East Bus Preservation Trust were also running the
shuttle service back to Tanfield, an old double-decker whose last gasp of normal service was as a
converted tourist sight-seer. I climbed straight to the top, like the giddy child i am, which turns
out to be less than ideal when it’s six degrees out and windy as all fuck. …And so that’s the story
of how i ended my lovely day out shivering my cheeks off on a creaky open-top bus careening down the
main road.
If you, too, would like to see some old trains, then too bad, because it’s closed until the spring.
That said, should everything be the same when they start up again, here’s what you’ll want to know:
Admission: £16.22 per adult, £14.31 per senior, £5.30 per child (or 25% off if you travel
by bus)
Address:
Andrews House:
Engine Shed, Marley Hill, Burdon Plain; GatesheadNE16 5ET
East Tanfield:
East Tanfield Station, Tanfield Railway, New Front St, Tanfield Lea,
StanleyDH9 9UY
Accessibility: Accessible toilets are available at Andrews House and East Tanfield, and
the railway’s official website states that a wheelchair-accessible partment is “usually
available”.
Arriving there: Andrews House is regularly served by the X30,
X31, and X32 buses from Newcastle and
Stanley.
The Tyne and Wear Metro is a marvel of the British railway network: the only true metro system
outside of London and Glasgow1, with fully accessible stations,
beautiful typographic design, and only the occasional closure because someone stole all the copper wiring again. But
amongst railway nerds, it is also known for one more puzzling detail: it’s a pretzel.
That’s right: you can, if you want, catch a Yellow Line train at Monument, go all the way around the
coast, wind up right back where you started, and continue all the way down to South Shields just to
rub it in. Put otherwise: there are four platforms and they’re all for the same line.
This is, as far as i know, unique to Newcastle.
Bucharest almost gets there, but chickens
out just before the line actually crosses over.
Sofia
nearly pulls it off but, in a shocking display of cowardice, redesignates its Line 4 as “Line 2”
halfway through the loop, disqualifying them immediately.
The Hague
does something even more complicated, but it’s on a tramway and i can’t in good faith count it. And
Vancouverused to have the same setup — even using the same colour — but switched to a perhaps more
sensible timetabling in 2016 when an extension rendered it unworkable.
As is often the case with urban rail, the constituent parts of the Tyne and Wear Metro were built at
different times by different, competing companies, and were only later stitched together into a
coherent network.
The first part of the loop to come online was the
Newcastle and North Shields Railway, starting in 1839, who ran a service from the centre of town to (where else?) North Shields, later
extended a teensy bit further to Tynemouth. The N&NSR’s
mighty viaducts
still carry our dinky yellow trains over the Ouseburn to this day.
Meanwhile, further north, coal mining in Northumberland was growing rapidly. (This brought great
prosperity to the region, which would surely never ever end. Ever. Unless they closed the mines, but
come on, why would that ever happen?) The existing main-lines found themselves choked by
the influx of traffic, and in 1852, Parliament authorised the incorporation of the newfangled
Blyth and Tyne Railway.
The B&T at first linked Bedlington and Blyth only to the staiths at
Percy Main, but by the eighteen-sixties it had added branches to the centre of town — encouraging
buildup in Newcastle’s northern suburbs — and to the growing seaside holiday destination of…
Tynemouth.
Hm.
Red is the Blyth and Tyne’s station; blue is the Newcastle and North Shields Railway’s.
By the early eighteen-eighties, both the B&T and the
N&NSR had been absorbed into the North Eastern Railway, which found
itself in the awkward position of having two formerly competing stations right next to each other
and no way for trains to transfer between the two. So, in 1882, the two competitors’ lines were
linked up with a new alignment running closer to the coast, including the opening of a
gorgeous palatial through station
at Tynemouth, still in use by Metro trains and Sunday markets to this day.
The earliest timetable i could find, from 1902, shows that trains were indeed running in a loop around the coast, from the city centre
to Wallsend to Tynemouth and back, just as is possible today.
At the dawn of the twentieth century, however, the steam services were threatened by a rising
competitor: the tram. No longer
did you have to put up with noisy, steam-belching locomotives every day — you could get to exactly
where you wanted to go, in style! This, of course, wouldn’t do, and so the
NER embarked on a rapid programme of electrification. By 1904, the loop
had fully switched over, and the network was rechristened the ✨️ Tyneside Electrics! ✨️
By this point, the network clearly resembled what we have today. Now, it didn’t quite loop
over itself like today — everything went through Central Station; no perpendicular Monument
tomfoolery here — and there was an extra branch snaking along the riverside which was never
refurbished for the Metro era. But other than that, the geometry was pretty well set, and there
would be no major service changes until the introduction of — what do you mean, you want to know
what the big black arrow’s for?
Whenever i show a diagram of the Metro to my non-Geordie friends, the first response is usually
something to the effect of, “Why isn’t there a link between North and South Shields?” It’s a fair
question, and the canned answer i usually give is that building one would be a lot of expense for
little point, since there’s already a well-trafficked, well-loved ferry service between the two.
Little did i know that it could well have been otherwise.
Elfric Wells Chalmers Kearney was an eccentric Australian engineer who spent much of his life trying
and failing to convince city governments to adopt his all-new danglebahn, the Kearney High-speed
Tube™. Here he is in 1910 with a model he made earlier:
Do you think they ever gave him his Blue Peter badge? (Photo courtesy of
Recondite Harmony)
The “Kearney Tube”, as it was known, would be powered by the force of gravity, hurtling down a ⅐
gradient from stations just below the surface like a bizarro funicular before climbing gracefully
back up, suspended between a monorail below and a guide rail above, which would (in theory)
stabilise the train’s side-to-side motion so as to not induce vomiting in everyone who rode it.
Mr Kearney promoted his invention in cities as distant as
Sydney,
London,
Portsmouth, and (if secondary sources are to be believed) Venice and New York, but it came closest to reality
between North and South Shields.
Over sixteen thousand Tynemouthicans signed
a petition
calling for its construction, and in 1925 the government gave a
provisional order
approving its construction. Alas, when it came time for a parliamentary committee to give Mr
Kearney’s dream the final go-ahead, they were rather more sceptical. He had raised nowhere near
enough money to actually build the blasted thing, and the members were quite concerned
about the impact it might have on the livelihood of the Tyne’s ferrymen.2
Mr Kearney
held a grudge
for the rest of his life. He made elaborate, typewritten conspiracy diagrams indicating who was
paying off who, and gleefully wrote of the death of his opponents on the committee — or even those
who were only tangentially connected:
Under pressure from Lord Ashfield, Henry Ford went back on his undertaking to finance the first
Kearney Tube between North and South Shields. Not long afterwards Esdell Ford [sic],
Henry Ford’s only son, was taken ill and died.
In 1939,
he gave it one more go, partnering with the LNER — only for the outbreak of the second world
war to put an abrupt halt to any civilian infrastructure plans. He would eventually write
a science-fiction novel titled
Erōne, where his his protagonist’s ideas are proven correct by a utopian society on
Uranus, and if only the good people of Earth would listen!
Mr Kearney died in 1966, never having seen his utopia come to fruition. I was unable to find where
or how, or even in which continent he is buried — he split his time between Australia and Britain,
and he could plausibly have passed on either side of the equator. Still, i hope he’s up there
somewhere, smiling down on all the shweebs, hyperloops, monorails, and other gadgetbahns of today.3
By the nineteen-sixties, the Tyneside Electrics had seen better days. Passenger numbers were
falling, the trains of tomorrow were decrepit, and they weren’t even electric — British Rail had
deemed it more cost-effective to run slower, dirtier diesel trains. The system had become a
kittiwake4
around the North East’s neck. So, in 1971, the local transport executive commissioned a study — and
they came back with a plan.
You know how the rest goes. Though the Tyne and Wear Metro would mostly reuse the existing routes
mentioned before, they would all be linked up through a newly constructed central core underground —
meeting in the middle at Grey’s Monument.
The pretzel shape was completed by proceeding one stop further from Monument to stubby St James’
Park.5
This was just a temporary terminus, of course — the station was built so that, in future, they could
easily come back and extend it out to the long-underserved west end of the city. Quoth 1981’s
“Tyne and Wear Metro: concept, organization, and operation”:
St James station is at the centre of an area designated for future office development and also
serves the football ground; the station has also been designed to allow the system to be
extended westwards at some future date.
So, eventually, that happened, right? They turned that little stumpy arm into a full-fledged
extension. Right? …Right?
In 1981, environment secretary Michael Heseltine vetoed any further extensions to the Metro system. Since
then, the only substantive changes have been in 1991 — inking the airport to the rest of Newcastle —
and 2002, when, after twenty years, the Tyne and Wear Metro finally reached Wearside. It is
around 2002 that things get a little silly.
This map floats around the internet a lot, though i haven’t been able to tie it back to its
original source.
Via the linked BBC article.
Shortly after service to Sunderland began, Nexus (the local transport operator) announced
Project Orpheus, their grandiose plan
to build a transport network fit for the twenty-first century. Bus rapid transit for everyone! A
cable car in Gateshead! And, yes, the valiant return of trams to Newcastle-upon-Tyne,
connecting the west end up with the city centre.
None of this happened.
The plans were watered down and watered down until all that was left was the vague idea of
refurbishing the Metro and making buses more frequent. The great recession and austerity presumably
killed any hope it had left. You still get
calls from local councillors
to extend the system to their part of the area, but they seem unlikely to amount to much. So is all
hope lost?
Well… remember the Blyth and Tyne Railway?
A Class 158 crossing the Wansbeck Viaduct. CC-BY, courtesy of
Steve Knight.
Passenger services along the B&T north of Backworth were given the chop
by Dr Beeching in the nineteen-sixties. Combined with the end of coal, this was a one-two punch in
the gut for working-class mining towns like Ashington and Blyth, leaving them some of the most
impoverished in the country.
Local campaigners have been calling for its reopening since the nineties, initially to little avail
barring a token mention in the ill-fated Project Orpheus plan. In 2013, Northumberland County
Council started taking the idea seriously. In 2019, the transport secretary gave the thumbs up. In
2021, shovels hit the dirt. And in 2024, for the first time in half a century, trains carried
passengers from Ashington to Newcastle.
It may be like pulling teeth, and it may cost more than we might like, but Britain
can still build things — and local politicians seem to have noticed! In 2024, work began on
the first serious proposal since Orpheus to extend the Metro; this time,
to Washington, along the disused
Leamside line.
Curiously, the proposed extension goes in yet another loop. It’s hard to imagine this
wouldn’t require some rejigging of how the network runs — a third line, perhaps? New
platforms at Pelaw? But however they run it, it looks like, if it goes through — and that’s
a big if — the Yellow Line may not be alone in its topological weirdness for long.
I’ve done some fairly interesting things this month, and had planned to write posts for each of them
— but, for whatever reason, none of them provided that particular spark to me. Maybe they just
didn’t seem that interesting to explain to you, the reader, or maybe i didn’t know what to say about
them except the obvious.
Nonetheless, it would be a shame for these events to pass into the annals of my journal without
telling you about them. So! Here’s a brief summary of my unblogged July thus far.
I toddled off to Shildon to visit Locomotion, the local
branch of the national railway museum. It’s the birthday of the railways, and thus boasts a
disproportionate selection of anorak arcana — alas, you can’t go in the trains, but you get
a pretty good look at the inside of Queen Alexandra’s royal train car, the erstwhile Birmingham
maglev, and, most proudly, Stephenson’s Rocket.
Locomotion also provides a lot to geek out about for any heraldry nerds.
Beamish1
has been newly crowned
Museum of the Year, so there was no better time to check it out. I hadn’t properly explored their new fifties town
yet — the chippie and the old houses are wonderful, but the record store, crammed up the stairs,
across an anachronistically modern mezzanine, and down a grey corridor, leaves much to be desired.
Nitpicks about balcony design aside, it’s as great as ever, and, somehow, well worth the £33(!!!!!)
asking price.
Finally, just yesterday, i went off to an Elbow concert hosted in a ruined mediæval priory by the
sea. Belting out “One Day Like This” in the fading dusk light with five thousand other people
standing on the same hallowed ground where monks tried to figure out where baby eels came from is a
top-ten human experience.
Washington1, a town in urban County Durham long since incorporated into Sunderland, is not a place where one
expects much nature. The palatinate’s chirping woods and rolling Pennine moors are not so far away,
and the path i took to get to today’s attraction led not through winding country roads but broad,
grey industrial arteries, designed to ferry thousands to and from Nissan’s immense factory.
But at the end of the road, down by the river Wear, there lies a wee patch of idyll: the
Washington Wetland Centre.
On a hilltop in the distance: the previously covered
Penshaw Monument.
I’d come on a good day for it, clearly, as the first thing i saw coming out of reception was the
staff corralling all the ducks together for their annual vaccination, by means of a ramshackle
assemblage of mesh fences. (Crowd control for birds!) The littlest one kept trying to escape his jab
like an ornithological Bobby Kennedy.
Most fabulous of all creatures of the air on offer are the eiders, the diva-est ducks in the world,
emitting a chorus of sassy coos as they revel in their status as undisputed kings of the pond.
(You’ll have to take my word for it, as i neglected to take a video, erring towards the side of it
being better to live in the moment than through a phone camera. I was yet to realise what good
blog-fodder the visit would make.)
As apologies for the lack of Eider Content, please accept this invasive rodent instead.
On the other side of the preserve a viewing area juts out to overlook the Wear — still salty and
tidal this close to the sea — and an artificial
saline lagoon, built to provide a home for those creatures who prefer a more brackish milieu. The signs tell me
that, rare as they historically have been, more and more European otters have made their home along
the wear, and the lucky visitor might hope to see one… if only the centre were open at dawn or at
dusk, when they come out.
The sign’s not joking — Asian small-claweds’ bite force is enough to break your bones.
Not to worry, for the centre are also very proud of their main mammal enclosure: a family of
utterly2
adorable Asian small-clawed otters. They’re a lot less squeaky than the ones at Northumberland Zoo,
and wondering why, two theories popped into my head.
First, that it’s the Northumbrians’ fault. Their northern sibs were greater in number, a family of
four to Durham’s two, and they were, by all accounts, masters of putting on a show. They appeared in
an orderly fashion when their circadian rhythms told them it was feeding time, pipped and squeaked
incessantly at the keeper until they got their fish, performed some cuteness, and then went back
inside when their bellies were full. They knew exactly what they were doing, methinks.
Second, that the Washingtonian otters were grieving. I said there were two, the younger Buster and
the elder Musa, and you might be hard-pressed to call that a family. But until this month, there
were three.
Mimi, the clan’s matriarch and a
scamp who bonked so much they had to give her a lutrine IUD, passed of
old age at fourteen (a good innings by her species’ standards, no doubt). When she went, they had to
put her corpse back in the enclosure so the others would understand.
They were still otters. Still playful. But something about them seemed… morose. Maybe, in between
the fish and the scampering and the puzzle feeders, they were still thinking about her.
On the way out, i passed a tiny observatory, cleverly named “Cygnus” for the constellation of the
swan, used by night for the
Sunderland Astronomical Society. I don’t know if it’s
of much use this far into the zone of light pollution, but they certainly seem to enjoy it, so
perhaps my relatively sky-privileged Northumbrian self shouldn’t play the lecturer. Perhaps that
fateful night that Mimi died, a star in the sky began to twinkle a little brighter.
I have to assume this has been here since at least last Christmas.
I think this used to be(?) a centre for birds of prey. Not sure why it was done up like an old
west town, if that’s the case…
I started hearing old-timey fairground music in the distance and it took me far,
far too long to realise that it was coming from the old-timey fairground Beamish has.
For fifteen minutes i was the most confused i had ever been in my whole life.
Feeling really quite glum over the news of
far-right riots near here yesterday.
I just keep coming back to the question… why Sunderland, of all places?
Not that it would be okay in any situation, but it’s not Leicester, where you have sectarian
tensions flaring up. It’s not Southport, where you just had a mass stabbing. It’s not even somewhere
with a properly substantial Muslim or immigrant population, like a Birmingham or a Boston. It’s
Sunderland. Why here, in what is, pardon my bluntness, the White British1
working-class capital of the UK?
I don’t know. I guess i thought it couldn’t happen here. That we were nicer up north. Or that the
scenery was too nice for people to get angry. Or that we were too left-wing even though Reform beat
the Tories in every constituency. Or maybe that we were too deprived, and that we didn’t
have anyone to scapegoat, because we knew it’d be shit no matter what.
Ach. History will trundle on as always, and in due time i’m sure the internet shit-stirrers and
fundie imams will be joining hands and complaining about all those filthy undersea neo-post-Bahá’í
immigrants from Atlantis taking our jobs. Maybe we can set up a football rivalry for everyone to
redirect their hate into like they did in Glasgow. Who knows.
Ushaw Hall’s website plays coy about itself. You can learn that
guide dogs are welcome, they’ll be exhibiting interactive “Humanimal” sculptures next month, and
that they're very proud of the pun “Ushaw in”, but curiously little about what the place actually is
(or was). I went anyway.
To spoil the fun, it’s an old Roman Catholic seminary that was turned into a museum when people
stopped being religious enough to care. The entrance makes that well clear; walking up from the car
park, the curious visitor is flanked by an ostentatious neo-Gothic chapel on their left and
modernist student housing on their right. (The latter remains unmuseumified, too boring to make much
out of.)
Right from reception there’s an interesting historical tidbit with a bust of Abraham Lincoln
himself, who a helpful volunteer told me once attended Ushaw before he decided a more secular
political career was right for him. (It was that or boxing, i suppose.) Upstairs is the Presidents’
Hall, whither the stairway looked off-limits enough not to chance it — so never mind that, and let’s
instead turn right.1
This takes us down a series of winding hallways with wibbly tiled floor — as of now, an exhibition
has lined them with wedding dresses old and new, including replicas of those worn by the royal
family, creepy mannequin heads and all.2
More importantly and more permanently, these are the chapels of Ushaw Hall.
They are beautiful, and have seen better days. The paint peels from a dimly-lit mural in a nook i
presume is for choirists. In others, light dances in vibrant oranges and blues through expository
stained glass. The brightest of them all, seen here to the right, invites its visitors to pray for
Ukraine in a solemn reminder of the times.
These smaller shrines have an intimacy to them that reflects the house’s hush-hush history. First
exiled from England, the Catholics settled in the small town of Douai, in the north of France — only
to be forced out again by the secular fervour of the French Revolution. Even then, they struggled to
find welcome in a staunchly Protestant Georgian England, until a sympathetic aristocrat sold them
land in Durham’s secluded hills. The hall itself was built with the façade of an unseeming terrace,
only showing its religious nature to those within.
Onwards, then, into the star of the show — the main chapel. Pews upon pews span the long gap between
the entrance and the colossal tabernacle, behind which the walls are adorned with what first looks
like simple ornament but reveals itself to be tightly-packed black-lettered Latin. You can tell it’s
Catholic by the eagle in the middle, the Vatican having never quite given up its attachment to its
Roman roots.
…Upstairs is the Presidents’ Hall, whither the stairway looked off-limits enough not to chance it —
so never mind that, and let’s instead turn left. Winding at right angles around the central court we
first arrive at the library, or what little you can access of it. Management and the university are
promising big things… eventually… once they restore everything… and catalogue it… and… oh, sod this,
let’s go to the café.
[One hot chocolate later…]
This is a wholly unrelated bookstore found elsewhere on church grounds. Behind the camera is a
fireplace. Yes, i am kicking myself for not photographing that instead.
As we were. Further along we find find the mess hall, where aspiring clergy once ate in silence,
with only the wet sopping of a hundred English breakfasts reverberating back and forth across the
walls. These days it’s used for noisier conferences and school trips, fitted with identikit metal
and plastic tables and seats which don’t do much to complement the nineteenth-century décor.
Some time later, past the temporary exhibition of inkjet printouts of old maps3, our trip comes full circle. As i walk home through the well-kempt garden and around the reedy old
pond, i might not have been convinced by the seminary’s faith, but i have been convinced of their
taste in interior decoration.
Hello. I’ve been to Consett. I thought you might like to hear about it. (Gosh, i’ve missed writing
that.)
It’s been
a miserable year
so far weather-wise, so wind-swept, cold-nipped, and rain-soaked that it took until April for me to
look outside and go, ah, not a bad day, let’s go for a jaunt.
The plan was simple: get a bus into Consett and head straight for the nearest hill. A short and
sweet saunter through woods and farmland; short compared to some of my previous odysseys from
Newcastle to the Wansbeck, sweet compared to the scenery in the more populous parts of the
palatinate. (It was not to be.)
I’m at the bubble tea / I’m at the tanning salon / I’m at the combination bubble tea and tanning
salon
We start in the centre of town, a humble lower-middle-class affair whose high street would strike
southerners as horrifyingly dilapidated and northerners as above average — nice enough, at least,
for the area’s local MP to choose it as his base of operations. Around
the corner from the cinema1, the pedestrianised and sensibly named Middle Street plays host to (in decreasing order of
classiness) a provider of musical instruments, an independent sweet shop–gift shop–pet shop, a
building society, a Greggs, a Superdrug, an animal rescue shelter, a frozen food emporium, a Turkish
barber, Ladbrokes, a vape shop, another vape shop which also sells computer parts and
repairs your phone (my lawyers say i can’t call it a mob front), and Barry’s Bargain Superstore.
This dumps us onto a crossing onto Parliament Street, where the Galileanically
inclined can attend the charming parish church (with “messy church” every month for the tots). I
follow it down its procession of historic terraces, in a rather literal sense: Briton Terrace, Saxon
Terrace, Norman Terrace, and then to spite me they finish it off with the pattern-breaking Tudor
Terrace. I suppose it could have been a later addition, going with Stuart Court across the road, as
well as Georgia and Edwardia Courts, two small cul-de-sacs i only noticed on Google Earth after the
fact… but that sequence gets thrown off yet again by the road whence those two branch off, Romany
Drive, which unless they meant to write “Roman” but hired a dyslexic cartographer has sod all to do
with the other streets.
A path bearing at its mouth a welcoming sign (all caps,
“no part of this land is dedicated to the public, any use of this land is entirely at the
user’s own risk, et cetera, et cetera”) marks a liberating end to our onomastic confusion, funneling us down a sloping green crescent of
parkland into a reclaimed steelworks. (It’s always a reclaimed steelworks.)
Finally, we reach the end of the funnel, where the light pours from the sky, the buildings abruptly
stop, and any wayward ramblers are left with only a gorgeous view of Durham’s rolling hills
stretching out before them. This exact moment, this exact view — this is why i get out. To sit on
the edge of a hill, the dull traces of modernity firmly behind you, and see the country not devoid
of man’s presence, but shaped by it, over hundreds and thousands of years, from hunting-grounds to
cleared forest to farmland to steelworks to grass for grass’s sake, a place where, like the terraces
of Parliament Street, you can hear England’s history sing in your veins.
Anyway then there’s a really steep path downhill where i almost slipped and fell like Super Mario
going down a slide.
Traipsing down steps i’m not 100% sure were public and over a road made of more pothole than asphalt
i wind up following a burn to the River Derwent. This is where our route’s industrial past makes
itself seen. Every few yards a worn sign pops up warning of a “drainageditch”, or a graffiti-blanketed pipe crosses the rain-cleaved dene;
at the very end, a picnic table by a former pump house grants me some respite.
I take stock of myself. My phone’s battery, always surprising me with innovative ways to run out, is
in danger of crossing the ten-percent mark. It’s the first nice day of the year, but that also means
i’m out of shape and out of practice: i won’t be able to make it all the way.
Equally, i’d be a fool to clamber back up all that. I keep walking. The rushing burn has become a
tranquil river, its waters still enough to see your reflection. I think to myself that if you’re
going to name a pencil company after a river, this one’s not a bad choice.2
Civilisation creeps back in with the tell-tale sounds of power tools. This is
Allensford Holiday Park, a modest gathering of caravans proudly advertising itself as “near the outstanding Northumberland
National Park”. (It isn’t.) When i get there it’s thronged by teen schoolboys freshly out,
chattering about video games and lining up for ice cream. (Something, something, nature is healing.)
Checking Google Maps with what power i have left reveals my worst fear: there’s nowhere to go but
up.
The distance is short, but the slope is grueling. I convince my legs to heave themselves up along
the side of pavementless roads, ducking into fallow fields and passing places wherever i
can find them. It gets worse the further i get. By the first field, i’m a little out of it. By the
Catholic boarding school, i’m utterly exhausted. When i climb what i think is the final hill, only
for perspective to cruelly show yet more around the corner, i wonder if this is what hell is like.
But i make it — sweating and breathless, hydrating myself sip by sip, i make it to the bus stop, and
wait. The driver, when he comes, must think i’m a zombie, but i’m glad to be on my way home. Note to
self: don’t take that big a break again.
Hello. I’ve been to the Bowes Museum. I thought i might
tell you about it.
Housed in a gloriously incongruous French mansion in the small town of
Barnard Castle1, it was built to house the art collections of the noble Bowes-Lyons — a family lucky enough to
count the Queen Mother herself among their members.
Its collection lies largely parallel to the “main” visual arts: ceramics, fashion, textiles,
furniture, and other such things which must account for function as much as form. Most of it plunges
headfirst into the latter, a bit frilly even for my often anti-modernist tastes, but i did like this
caduceus-adorned wooden cabinet:
The star of the show here is the Silver Swan, a gorgeous eighteenth-century automaton which preens
and sways on a bed of glass water. Unfortunately, it’s broken, and the closest you’ll get to see it
is its dismembered corpse awaiting restoration, so [raspberry noise]. You can,
however, see their exhibition on its legacy, which houses a wonderful collection of modern
animatronics made by crafters and tinkerers from all over the world, like this 10/10 pianist:
There are a few items which don’t fit into the above. They’ve managed to snag some real Goyas,
Canalettos, and El Grecos. (Los Grecos?) They even have Charles Babbage’s Difference Engine, somehow
— i assume it’s on loan from London?
On a hilltop in County Durham sits the
Penshawi monument, a nineteenth-century folly built to commemorate the late Earl of Durham. It’s always been on my
bucket list, but it’s a bit of a pain to get to via public transport, and i’d never found the time —
last week, though, i found myself with some time off and decided to make the trip. I’ll let the
pictures do the talking from here…
A view of the monument from the nearby country park. As you can see, there was a motorbike race
on at the time, which somewhat dampened the otherwise-peaceful atmosphere. Tut tut.
The monument was based on Athens'
temple to Hephæstos, though in a rather scaled-down format (see the lack of any kind of roof).
We weren’t allowed inside the naos, as they were busy setting it up for that night’s
Lumiere festival.ii
(They did let some of the people walking their bulldogs up — perhaps because they were too
scared?)
The country park also has this neat little henge, with viewfinders pointing towards some
well-known County Durham sites — that little black square you can make out is Durham Cathedral.
Information for visitors
Address:
Chester Rd, Penshaw, Houghton le SpringDH4 7NJ
.
Accessibility: Getting up to the monument requires a steep hike up a hill; if
you have impaired mobility, you may want to think twice before going.
Getting there: The hill is served by the A183 road
and the 2, 2A, and 78 buses. The nearest train station is
Chester-le-Street, five miles away.
Verborgen tussen de heidevelden en Penninsche pieken van County Durham ligt de machtigste waterval
in Engeland. Het water van
High Force tuimelt over 22 meter en 300
miljoen jaar rots naar het poel beneden. De waterval is ontstaan waar de rivier de Tees de
Whin Sill kruist, een harde plaat van
stollingsgesteente die een groot deel van het noorden van Engeland bedekt.
Als het waterpeil hoog genoeg is splitst de kracht zich in twee stromen, waarvan er een de andere
kant op gaat rond de rotsen — na stormen kan het zelfs het hele plateau overstromen. Helaas, mijn
groep had niet zoveel geluk, ondanks recente regenbuien.
De familie Raby, de eigenaars van het landgoed, vragen £5 om het uitzicht vanaf de voet van de
waterval te mogen bewonderen. De waterval torent boven degene die durft naar beneden te gaan… en die
niet zal missen dat er enkele mensen staan boven aan de rotsen. Die hebben helemaal niets betaald,
want zij wandelde langs de gratis
Penninische Weg. Verdorie.
Informatie voor bezoekers
Adres:
High Force, Forest-in-Teesdale, Barnard Castle, County Durham,
DL12 0XH, Verenigd Koninkrijk.
Bereikbaarheid: Openbaar vervoer is schaars in dit deel van het land, dus u
kunt het beste een schilderachtige autorit maken door de Pennines en het negentiende-eeuwse dorp
Middleton-in-Teesdale.
Prijs: Het Raby landgoed rekent £5 voor toegang via de bodem, maar de top is
gratis toegankelijk door een wandeling langs de Penninische Weg.
Toegankelijkheid en faciliteiten: Het pad is, voor zover ik weet, niet
rolstoeltoegankelijk. De familie Raby houden toiletten en een hotel voor wie wil
overnachten.
Nestled amongst County Durham’s moors and Pennine peaks lies England’s mightiest waterfall. The
waters of High Force tumble over 22
metres and 300 million years of stone, down into the plunge pool below. The falls were formed where
the river Tees meets the Great Whin Sill, a
tough slab of igneous rock covering much of the north of England.
When the water level is high enough, the force splits into two streams, one going the other way
around the rocks — after storms, it can even overflow the plateau entirely. Alas, despite recent
showers, my group were not so lucky.
The Raby family, owners of the estate, charge £2 to see the view from the base of the falls. The
falls tower over any mere human who dares navigate down, demanding one’s respect and attention… and
making it unmissable that, at the top of the falls, there are several people who walked their on
their own via the
Pennine Way, not having to
pay a single dime. Drat.
Information for visitors
Address:
High Force, Forest-in-Teesdale, Barnard Castle, County Durham,
DL12 0XH.
Getting there: Public transit connections are few and far between this far into
the countryside, so your best bet is to take a scenic drive via car through the Pennines and the
nineteenth-century village of Middleton-in-Teesdale.
Price: The Raby estate charges £2 to access via the bottom, but the top can be
freely accessed by a hike along the Pennine Way.
Opening times: 10:00–16:00.
Accessibility and facilities: The trail is not, to my knowledge,
wheelchair-accessible. The site contains toilets and a hotel for anyone wanting to stay the
night.
