A few lines from the past - one that divided a nation

2:21pm Tuesday 4th November 2008

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Memories looks at an exhibition and a new book recalling life in the terraces in the shadow of the Bishop of Durham's palace.

'LANGUAGE is too weak, and but few pencils are powerful enough to delineate the rich scenery of Auckland Park, " said a visitor to Bishop Auckland in 1850.

So a modern delineation of its cliffs and bridges, its ancient trees and steep slopes, its quirky deerhouse and its broad high plains is all but impossible.

Suffice to say, it is a splendid spot for relaxation - although a walk up those steep slopes requires an unrelaxing amount of puff.

In the past, the park has been a spot for sport and elegance. It was also, as a new book tells, a playground for the kids of the Batts Bank area and a place where, in times of economic depression, their parents precipitously scratched in the hope of finding a little coal.

The Bishop of Durham has had a manor house on top of the hill overlooking the confluence of the Wear and the Gaunless since at least 1183. In fact, he may well have placed his house on the site of an old Roman lookout station connected to Binchester just up Dere Street.

As the manor house grew into a palace or castle, so the grounds around grew into a park. On October 16, 1346, this park was big enough for several thousand English soldiers to camp out in preparation for the next day's Battle of Neville's Cross, near Durham City, in which the Scots were routed and their king, David II, was captured.

To the Bishop of Durham, the park was 800 acres of sporting pleasure which, in 1350, he enclosed with a £400 stone wall.

Inside, he had fallow deer, fish ponds and rabbit warrens, as well as a herd of wild white cattle.

The coppiced trees also provided wood and charcoal for the palace.

However, during the English Civil Wars of the 1640s, the park fell into disrepair, and it fell to Bishop Richard Trevor to restore it. He was bishop from 1752 until 1771 (he was the one who bought the series of 12 paintings by Francisco de Zurburan, now valued at more than £200m, for £124 as they encapsulated his desire for religious tolerance).

He had Sir Thomas Robinson of Rokeby - a colourful eccentric who also built the daring single span Abbey Bridge over the Tees at Egglestone - create the Gothic gateway off the Market Place.

And he had surveyor Jeremiah Dixon, of Cockfield, one of this column's heroes, lay out and plant up much of what we still see today, from the trees, to the straightened Gaunless, to the drive, sweeping over the Bishop Trevor Bridge and up to the Great Gates at Park Head - the route the Bishop took in his carriage to his cathedral at Durham.

In this period, they added the deerhouse, with its grassed quadrangle and covered cloisters acting as shelter for the deer, and its South Tower acting as cover for the parties who came out to hunt them.

With its castellated eccentricity, the deerhouse is an attractive oddity. But nature is the main attraction.

A late Victorian visitor wrote: "The ground on the south slopes swiftly down to the Gaunless, which enters the park from the castle mills and after making several rapid turns falls into the River Wear. The opposite bank of the Gaunless rises as steeply, and both banks are covered with forest trees.

"Turning the corner the grand cliff comes into view. It is an object of great interest to geologists as it displays the numerous rock strata which here over-lie the coal. " Coal had been mined in the park since the 14th Century, but its shallow outcrops of the Butterknowle fault only proved viable in times of economic hardship - as this picture from Tom Hutchinson's new book shows.

It was taken in 1912 during a miners' strike. The men who lived in the terraces on Batts Bank hopped over the park wall, scaled the cliff and dug out what they could while the Bishop, Handley Moule, turned a blind eye.

During the depression of the Twenties and Thirties, Tom's grandfather did the same, and we have to hope that no one is reduced to this in the first recession of the 21st Century.

TOM'S new book is called Down the Batts Bank. It is a collection of pictures from lost streets such as Wear Chare, Batts Terrace, Dial Stob Hill and Jock's Row. As Echo Memories told in May, 500 people lived in those low-lying terraces - "batts" means low-lying pastures - until the clearance 50 years ago.

It was not the richest area of town. Many of its inhabitants laboured for the Bishop in Auckland Park; others worked underground at Newton Cap, Leasingthorne or Newfield.

Tom is a fourth generation Batty person - his family lived there from 1888 until 1962. "It was a place where everybody helped their neighbours and everybody knew everybody else, and for us children it couldn't have been bettered anywhere - the Batts, the river, the park, High Wood, Bellburn, the Dam Head and the bank for sledging. " Nowadays we don't even get any proper snow that allows sledging!

Down the Batts Bank: Memories of a Bishop Auckland Community by Tom Hutchinson is published on November 6 for £5. An exhibition of the photographs and maps in the book takes place at the Discovery Centre, North Bondgate in Bishop from 10am to 3pm on November 6-8 and 13-15. The book - signed as required - will be available at the exhibition. It is also available from the Tourist Information Centre in the Town Hall and from Cribec News and Etheringtons Newsagents which are both in Cockton Hill Road.

ONCE, the Bishop of Durham had six castles and eight manorial residences. Now the poor chap is down to just the one, Auckland Castle.

JEREMIAH DIXON is famous for far more than Auckland Park. In fact, County Durham cannot have produced any man who is still so famous 250 years after his death.

He was born further up the Gaunless, in Cockfield, in 1733 where his father was a well-to-do Quaker mineowner. He was educated at John Kipling's Academy, in Barnard Castle, where he showed a flair for mathematics and astronomy. He was introduced to the legendary Hurworth sundial maker William Emerson, who opened his mind to the delights of alcohol to such an extent that he was temporarily disowned by his abstemious Quaker family.

Emerson also introduced him to the Royal Society, whose astronomers interviewed the 27year-old at the Royal Woolwich Academy in 1760.

"Did you study mathematics at Oxford or Cambridge? " asked the academics.

"At neither place, " replied Jeremiah.

"Then at what public school did you get your rudiments? " countered the experts.

"At no public school, " replied Jeremiah.

"Then pray tell, at what particular seat of learning did you acquire them? " asked the academics, becoming increasingly exasperated.

"In a pit cabin on Cockfield Fell, " replied Jeremiah.

Hegot the job, and they sent him to the southern seas to scan the skies. His greatest claim to fame is that, with fellow surveyor Charles Mason, he worked out the border between the US states of Pennsylvania and Maryland. This line, known to schoolchildren around the world as the MasonDixon Line, effectively divided the slave-owning states of the south from the free states of the north.

It is even said that slaves escaped their bondage in the south, slipped over the Line and toasted their freedom in the nightclubs that grew up along it.

Indeed, it is said that a new form of Afro-Caribbean inspired jazz music developed in these clubs: Dixieland Jazz, named after the chap from Cockfield Fell who cocreated the defining line.

What a great story! What a claim to fame for Cockfield!

However, it seems more likely that entrance into these nightclubs cost ten cents. In French-speaking areas, this translated as dix cents? While Jeremiah was surveying the Line, his elder brother, George, was dreaming of building a canal that would connect the mines of Cockfield Fell with the sea at Stockton so that the coal could be lucratively sent to market. You can still to this day see on the top of the fell the outlines of George's trial section of canal, which is the start of the thought processes that created the Stockton and Darlington Railway.

Brother Jeremiah's wanderings over, he returned to County Durham and worked as a surveyor, most notably on Auckland Park and Lanchester Common.

He died in Cockfield, in 1779, aged 46, and was buried in an unmarked grave in the Quaker cemetery in Staindrop. He was unmarried, although in his will he left his worldly possessions to Mary Bland and her two daughters?