Boar blimey!

THE king and the Bishop of Durham issued proclamations offering large rewards to whoever could kill the boar, but none succeeded. It gored all-comers to death.

Young Richard Pollard decided to try his luck. He rode out to Etherley Dene, which was known to be the lair of the boar, and climbed a beech tree to see if he could spot it.

As he climbed, he shook beech nuts out of the tree.

These were the boar’s favourite food and it came galumphing over and proceeded to gorge itself at the foot of the tree.

Stealthily, Richard climbed down the trunk and when the boar seemed to be dozing off after its large meal, he attacked it with a sword. The boar, though, was no easy victim.

It fought back and the pair battled it out throughout the night.

Only as the sun was rising did Richard prove victorious.

He slew the terrible beast with his falchion and slashed out its tongue as a keepsake, which he put in his wallet.

But the lengthy fight had worn him out, and before returning to Auckland Castle to collect his reward, he snuggled down in the undergrowth for a kip.

Now, the lord of Mitford Castle, near Morpeth, just happened to be passing – no doubt alerted by the noise of the dreadful scuffle. He stole the boar’s giant carcase from under the snores of the sleeping knight and dashed off to the bishop to claim his reward.

Richard awoke, and found himself bereft of the body.

But in his wallet, of course, he had the tongue. He went to the castle, presented the bishop with the evidence and beseeched his lordship to look inside the boar’s mouth.

Seeing the tongueless boar, the bishop accepted Richard’s word but was unable to give him the money because the Northumbrian blaggard had made off with that. Instead, he offered to give him all the land he could ride around while the bishop ate his lunch.

Richard was a canny fellow, and strode his horse around the castle, thus claiming all the bishop’s wealth as his own.

The bishop immediately reneged on the deal, but being a man of the cloth, offered Richard land to the southwest of Bishop Auckland. It became known as Pollard’s land – and to this day the Pollard’s Inn celebrates the story.

Fred Wallis, now in Barnard Castle but who was born in Etherley Moor in 1930, says: “At the bottom of Jumbo Field was a fallen tree that was there for years and years.

We used to play on it and out elders told us that that was where Sir Richard slew the boar.”

WE were last debating the Jumbo Field in Memories 71. It is just south of Etherley Grange and Etherley Moor, and it was said that it got its unusual name because a circus elephant once fell down an old pit shaft there.

Fred, who started down Etherley Dene Colliery in 1944, feels there is a more simple explanation; it was the biggest field in the area.

Jumbo Field does seem at some point in the past 150 years to have been the site of a shaft, a pitheap and a driftmine all connected with the colliery. It was sunk in 1856 and remained a major feature of the landscape into the 1950s.

The entrance to the colliery – the pit yard – is now under the houses of Langley Grove.

John Biggs, of Etherley Grange, leads us down Wigdan Walls Road, over Rush Burn – which flows through Jumbo Field and into Etherley Dene – to Wigdan Walls Farm.

The farm’s unusual name, which is spelled “Wigdan” by the Ordnance Survey, has long been intriguing us.

But, as John points out, the farm calls itself “Wigdon Walls”.

Either Wigdan or Wigdon, we still don’t know what it means.

OWEN Etherington, 69, of Kelloe, visited Beamish museum last year with his grandson and was shocked to see his old local, the Sun Inn from Bondgate, Bishop Auckland, standing there.

“I just walked in and I was 18 again, a teddy boy, drainpipe trousers, knee-length jacket and Brylcreem in my hair and a quiff,” he says.

As Memories 69 mentioned, the Sun was dismantled brick-by-brick in the late 1980s and re-erected in the museum high street.

“It was slightly different to how I remembered it, but not much,” he says. “There used be a long, dark passageway with more little, dark snug rooms – it used to cost you a penny more to drink in the posh end.”

Amazingly, Owen checked under one of the heavy, wrought iron tables and there – more than 40 years after it had last left his mouth – was a piece of chewing gum.

ECHO Memories has been hanging out in Harperley for some months now. It is an intriguing piece of land beside the Wear, between Wolsingham and Crook, which has ancient settlements, old railways and lurid ghost stories.

David Hartley, from Low Shipley, gets in touch. Low Shipley is on the opposite bank of the Wear, but chapel and school were both on the Harperley side.

“The original footbridge was washed away in 1947 and for about eight years we had a plank across, supported in the middle by an oildrum filled with stones, and fixed to the bank by a wire rope,” he says. “That’s how we went to school in Wolsingham, and we never missed – I can remember walking home in short trousers in a foot of snow.”

The Hartleys have farmed Low Shipley since 1929. Their land includes a mysterious U-shaped hollow known as Shipley Moat.

“It’s just an indentation in the field, no stones, but it is fairly obvious it was something,” says David.

“A lot of people have examined it, had a bit dig, but no one has come up with anything.”

The curiosity of Tony Robinson’s Time Team a few years ago came to nothing, and so it remains either a moated 12th Century manor house or the outline of a 5th Century Romano-British settlement.

PEGGY WINCHESTER (nee Martin) also had a real journey to school.

She lived at Cat Castle, overlooking the Deepdale Viaduct in Teesdale. She had to walk a mile into Lartington to catch the 7.15am train which took her to Kirby Stephen Grammar School over the Stainmore summit.

“On about February 23, 1947, the train got stuck in a drift near the Belah Viaduct, and it was still stuck there when school broke up for Easter,” she says.

“The school put us up in a house for weeks, and we just had the clothes we stood up in. I had to go to the outfitters and explain that my grandparents would send money for new socks when the snow had melted.”

These days we have a mobile phone pinned to our ear while we absent-mindedly tweet or text with the other hand, keeping the whole world up to date with our every move. In those days, there were no phones in remote places like Cat Castle and there was no post because snow blocked the roads. Her grandparents on the east of the Pennines just assumed that she, on the west of the Pennines, was stuck because they couldn’t hear any trains coming over the viaduct.

ALAN SMART in Sedgefield has also been following the Stainmore line coverage. “My parents had a tandem and from 1938, when I was ten, I had my own bike, so we cycled from our home in Kelloe to Barnard Castle once a year, boarded the train to Kirby Stephen with me in the guard’s van with the bikes, detrained at Kirby and then biked to Keswick for a precious week’s holiday,” he says.

“This routine was kept up until 1942 when I started work at Royal Ordnance Factory No 21 at Low Spennymoor.”

ONE of the best selling books of the moment is the reprint of George Bradshaw’s Descriptive Railway Hand-Book of Great Britain and Ireland.

Published in 1863, just one original copy survives – and it is in the hands of Michael Portillo, who is using at as his guide on his third series of Great British Railway Journeys.

Bradshaw was a Manchester engraver who, in 1839, published the world’s first compilation of railway timetables.

As railwaymania spread across Britain, there were 150 or more private railway companies, each issuing timetables for their own small lines.

Bradshaw’s compilation became indispensable to any Victorian railway traveller who wished to avoid getting lost.

Bradshaw’s descriptive guide was a companion to the timetable and told the traveller a little about the towns through which he was travelling.

Darlington railway enthusiast Barrie Lamb has acquired some copies of Bradshaw’s which he is selling for the marked price of £10, but £2 of each sale goes to the Darlington Railway Preservation Society.

For more information, call Barrie on 01325-350174.

CONGRATULATIONS to Barningham Local History Group which has just won the 2012 Local History Newsletter of the Year Award from the British Association for Local History.

The 20-page Archive was first published in 2009 by editor Jon Smith and is distributed to all 81 members of the group – the Teesdale village of Barningham only has a population of 150. The Archive is packed with local fascination, and several of its stories have been shamelessly stolen to help fill Echo Memories.For details, email history@smithj90.fsnet.co.uk