Bypass ushered in a new era after years of waiting

On that June day, the Ferryhill Cut was opened and the most notorious and precipitous bank on the Great North Road was bypassed.

We may think that today it takes ages for a new road to be built – they seem to have been widening the A66 for decades – but the completion of the Ferryhill Cut marked the end of a roadwork that had started nearly a century earlier.

Ferryhill sits on a large lump of limestone which has created a high, steep hill with ravines on either side. On its east, the ravine was deep and wide and was known as the Ferryhill Gap. On its west, the ravine was more narrow and shallow and was known as the Ferryhill Gorge.

Rather than bother with either the Gap or the Gorge, the Great North Road climbed 538ft above sea level into the village itself – making Ferryhill the second highest point on the road south of Berwick (Gateshead High Fell is, apparently, higher).

The southern slope into Ferryhill was hard but manageable; the northern slope was steep and, in poor weather, impossibly impassable for the horses.

In 1745, the Great North Road running from Boroughbridge to Thirsk, Northallerton, Croft-on- Tees, Darlington, Ferryhill, Croxdale and Durham was one of the first in the region to become a turnpike trust. In effect, the Government privatised it. The trustees had to maintain the road in a fair condition and in return they were allowed to extract tolls from travellers.

In 1832, the trustees began work to bypass the village and the notorious slopes of Ferryhill.

They decided to widen the shallower, narrower Gorge on the west of Ferryhill and turn it into a road.

But the 1830s were the age of railwaymania. No one was investing in turnpike roads. Everyone was ploughing their money into steam and track.

In 1834, the Port Clarence Railway – a northern rival to the Stockton and Darlington Railway – used the Ferryhill Gap to reach the Durham coalfield. In 1844, the East Coast Main Line was also laid through the Gap, and so Ferryhill Station (opened 1840) must have seemed to be at the centre of the railway world.

The Boroughbridge to Durham turnpike trustees realised the futility of their investment, and in 1835 abandoned their roadworks.

They had dug out little more than a footpath that petered out halfway through the Gorge.

During the second half of the 19th Century, these earthworks became an entertaining and irritating oddity for travellers who persevered with the Great North Road. They were entertained as they saw that someone had spent several years and much money building a road to nowhere, but they were irritated by still having to travel along the treacherous Ferryhill inclines.

A 1913 guide to County Durham says: “The curious cutting and embankment in Ferryhill village, parallel with and at one place intersecting the main road, is an incompleted attempt of the turnpike authorities to lessen the hill for the stagecoaches.

It is to be hoped that the improvement will before long be taken in hand and completed for the benefit of modern road traffic.”

The writer, JE Hodgkin, didn’t have to wait long, because in 1918, Durham County Council started spending £49,000 completing the project which had been abandoned 83 years earlier.

And so the Ferryhill Gorge was widened and levelled until it became the Ferryhill Cut.

The road through it – the A1 until the mid-Sixties when it became the A167 – was opened amid great celebration on June 30, 1923.

Councillor WH Wood, chairman of the county works committee, cut the ribbon and Major KC Appleyard, vice-chairman of the committee, “remarked that there was something quite romantic about the road which had been so closely affected in its history by three types of transport: the stagecoach, the railway and now the motor”.

County Surveyor AE Brooks said it was the first time in Durham that clinker asphalt had been laid on a road. It cost 35 per cent more than traditional tarmacadam but was expected to last up to 80 per cent longer.

Then Sir Arthur F Pease, chairman of the county council, declared the road “a sound economic prospect” and all the nobs disappeared into the school for refreshments, allowing boys and men in big flat caps to wander about the road that had taken so long to complete.

Their wanderings took them under three bridges. The central one carried the road – now the B6287 – to Kirk Merrington.

The northerly one went directly into the Dean and Chapter Colliery; the southerly one was a footbridge connecting the ancient village of Ferryhill to the east of the Cut with the new colliery settlement of Dean Bank on the west.

The Dean and Chapter Colliery was sunk in 1902 by Bolckow Vaughan and Co of Middlesbrough on land owned by Durham Cathedral. In 1914, the colliery employed just under 3,000 men, triggering a population explosion.

In 1902, 3,123 people lived in Ferryhill. In 1921, 10,674 lived in Ferryhill. In 1914 alone, Bolckow Vaughan built 999 houses for its miners in Dean Bank, and in 1939 there were so many miners that they had to be housed in temporary huts.

Apart from a lean spell in the early Thirties, Dean and Chapter continued to employ nearly 3,000 men until the end of the Fifties – it was one of the biggest pits in the famous Durham coalfield.

Then a rapid decline set in and the National Coal Board closed the pit in 1966. It was demolished in 1967, and its pitheap landscaped.

Now an industrial estate is on its site – although its bridges still span the Ferryhill Cut which came into being as a result of one of the most long-drawn out roadworks in the history of roadbuilding.

Ferryhill History Society’s limited edition 2008 calendar costs £2 and is available from the Ladder Centre in Coniston Road, Kelly’s Newsagents in The Broom Road, C&A Naylor Newsagents in Darlington Road, and Ferrydec in Parker Terrace, all of which are in Ferryhill itself, plus the Eldon Arms in Ferryhill Station.

AS this column is obsessed by old theatres at the moment, we are searching for information about a Spennymoor theatrical called Gertrude Vickers Meredith on behalf of Dr Ann Featherstone of the University of Manchester.

Gertrude’s father, William Green Vickers, had a portable Victorian theatre called the Royal Alhambra which travelled from town to town. It was a bit like a flat pack shed with a canvas roof. William toured Derbyshire, Lancashire, Nottinghamshire and Yorkshire from about 1868 until 1884.

Gertrude was a child actress in her father’s touring company and in later life continued her career on the stage.

But in the 1920s, she settled down in Spennymoor, and in 1936 she is listed as running her business, Modiste, at numbers 24 and 51 High Street.

She wrote articles and did a Home Service broadcast about her father’s Royal Alhambra Theatre, and seems to have compiled her memories into a book.

Dr Featherstone, though, cannot find a copy of the book and has been unable to find out any more about Gertrude. If anyone can help, please contact Echo Memories at the address above.