Holy house demolished before it sank into hell

SACRISTON is a mining village a handful of miles north-west of Durham City. It exploded into life in 1839 when the Victoria Pit was sunk and a wagonway, powered by a stationary engine on Daisy Hill, hauled the coal up onto Waldridge Fell, where a railway took it down to the Tyne to be shipped to market.

In the colliery’s heyday in the 1920s, it employed more than 1,100 men, 850 of them working underground.

But before this frenetic industrial activity, there were only a couple of farmers and a sacrist.

The sacrist – also known as a sacristan or a sexton – was one of the senior monks at Durham Cathedral Priory.

His name comes from a Latin word, sacristanus, which means “custodian of sacred relics”.

In medieval French, this word became “segrestein”, which coloured the way the people of County Durham used it.

Today, older people may refer to Sacriston as “Segerston”, whereas younger people might call it “Segga”.

The sacrist, as well as looking after the precious items, also had to keep the cathedral maintained, lit, cleaned and heated.

To fund the sacrist’s works, Hugh Pudsey, Bishop of Durham from 1153 to 1195, gave him a heugh – a hilly promontory.

At first, the sacrist leased the farmland to raise money; then, in the 13th Century, he built a manor house called Segrestaynheugh.

High on his heugh, the sacrist lived in tranquillity.

After him, well-to-do Durham’s merchants rented the property.

In 1733, the Charlaw Pit was sunk nearby.

However, the miners didn’t come in numbers until 1839 when steam-powered machines enabled a proper profit to be earned from their labours.

The miners, though, undermined the sacrist’s manor house, causing it to subside. The last tenants left about 1949 and the ancient building was demolished soon after, without its history being properly recorded.

Now local historian Martin Roberts is hoping to put that right before time erases the manor house from living memory.

“I hope to assemble all the known photographs and reconstruct its plan,” he says.

“It was a very important medieval building in the history of County Durham, and Durham Cathedral in particular, and its fairly recent demolition makes the lack of any record all the more frustrating.”

If anyone has knowledge of the old house, please contact Mr Roberts at Old Fleece House, 20B Front Street, West Auckland DL14 9HW, or call on 01388-833214, or email at martin@fleece.

wanadoo.co.uk IN 1945, Bedale was transformed into a film set for The Way to the Stars, a black and white wartime movie that, by coincidence, was last screened the weekend after the Memories article on the town (Echo, Jan 13).

“I belong Bedale and I’m going to soon be 90,” said an anonymous caller. “I learnt to swim in Bedale Beck, many years ago with an old car tyre round me. There were lots of bricks and glass on the bottom, but I wore plimsolls.

“I always understood as a girl that below the harbour there was a whirlpool, and I remember watching them film The Way to the Stars, around the Market Cross and along the Market Place.”

The Way to the Stars was directed by Anthony Asquith and starred Michael Redgrave, John Mills and Rosamund John. It is regarded as one of the best British contemporary war films, particularly for the way it summons up the wartime atmosphere.

Although scenes were filmed in Bedale’s Black Swan pub, the film’s script demanded that the on-screen pub was called the Golden Lion. Therefore, Rosamund John’s character, Miss “Toddy” Todd, is said to be the Golden Lion’s landlady, who is bereaved when her fiancé (Redgrave) is shot down over France, and so the Black Swan missed out on its place in cinematic history.

ALAN Macnab in Darlington had a stab at answering our question about who put the “em” in Emgate.

He said: “I lived in Bedale from 1955 to 1961 in the old Fleece Hotel (now no longer in existence) next to Asquith’s the Butchers.

Bedale Beck at the bottom of Emgate is known as the River Em.”

The only River Em that the internet knows about is one in Sweden, which “is home to some of the largest sea trout in the world”. But Mr Macnab lived in Bedale in 1955BG – Before Google.

IN 2006, Memories ran a series on the local Sixties beat bands, including Gemini 5, from Crook. In the first week of 2010, an email arrived.

“Greetings from Denmark,”

it said. “I am working on a book about the Copenhagen beat-mecca Hit House, where Gemini 5 played 14 days in 1966. Do you by any chance have an email address of one of the guys?”

No we don’t, but we’ll pass it on if one of the guys gets in touch.

THE Railway Tavern in High Northgate, Darlington, is probably the oldest, purpose-built, continuously-operated, railway-related pub in the world, but English Heritage believes it has been too bashed about over the decades to be worth listing.

The Tavern was one of three pubs built in 1826-27 by John Carter for the newlyopened Stockton and Darlington Railway. The others were at Stockton and Aycliffe Lane (later Heighington station), and if not fully-fledged stations, these were the world’s first purpose-built gathering points for railway passengers.

Let’s claim them as the world’s first railway refreshment rooms.

But English Heritage has just rejected a wellresearched application by Brendan Boyle, of Darlington, to have the pub listed.

It says: “Significant alteration to both its interior and exterior is too great.”

This, though, seems to overlook the pub’s importance to the North Road cluster of listed railway buildings around the Head of Steam museum. The Tavern enhances the story that this historic cluster tells of those very first days of railway operation.

Despite these being perilous times for pubs, the Tavern is in no danger. A little protection for Darlington’s railway heritage would never go amiss, though.

OVER the Cocker Beck from the Tavern is the Bridge Hotel, rebuilt in 1898 and apparently named after the manner in which High Northgate crosses the beck.

Mr Boyle’s research suggests that, before the railway, this pub was on the very edge of town and was known as the Blue Bell Inn.

In the early 1820s, the Blue Bell found itself with a view towards a towering industrial construction: the Skerne Bridge, designed by Durham Cathedral’s architect Ignatius Bonomi and the largest structure on the 26 miles of the Stockton and Darlington Railway.

As opening day – September 27, 1825 – approached, excitement mounted. In a canny move, the landlord (possibly William Gray) ditched the Blue Bell name, which was redolent of the rural past, and renamed it The Railway Bridge Inn, which sounded much more up-to-date.

During the 19th Century, the novelty of the railway wore off, and the name was shortened to the Bridge Hotel.

“Still,” says Mr Boyle, “it may well have been the first pub in the world to bear the name ‘railway’.”

TIME to return to sundials. Since time immemorial, man has used a gnomon – a vertical stick that casts a shadow – to show the time of day.

In the Eighth Century, the Venerable Bede created a table from which a monk could estimate the time of day according to the length of his shadow – the human gnomon.

In Hurworth, as Memories told last week, the mastermathematician William Emerson (1701-1782) created at least 30 sundials to test his theories before he published his book, the Art of Drawing Dials, in 1770.

Hurworth is ideally suited for gnomonic research because its long, straight line of houses faces due south over the River Tees.

Only one genuine Emerson sundial is said to remain, and that is on the Bay Horse pub. It is dated 1739, which was when Emerson was beginning his mathematical career.

Down the river in Neasham is Emerson House.

It has a sundial on it – presumably an Emerson which has migrated from Hurworth.

The best dial of all, though, is on West End, near Hurworth’s Spar shop. It hasn’t been whitewashed for decades, and its gunmetalgrey face with a hint of brown or gold lettering may be its original colouring.

It says “C:Hunter” on it, so it appears to have been made by Emerson’s mathematical assistant, John Hunter (the men are buried close to one another in the village churchyard).

It is dated 1772, and says “Latitude 54.34”.

Latitude – the horizontal lines around the globe which locate a place to the north or south of the equator – is one of the important mathematical considerations when making an accurate sundial.

Modern calculations suggest that Hurworth’s latitude is 54.48 degrees, so perhaps Emerson and Hunter were slightly out.

If there’s an elderly sundial in your neighbourhood, Memories would love to hear about it.

■ With thanks to Tony Clamp.