MEMORIES was speaking last week to the Stockton Probus Club, which meets at the West End Bowls Club in Hartburn. On checking our directions, Google Maps kept drawing our attention to a “historical landmark” on the sharp bend beside the bowls club which it claimed was a “Stockton & Darlington Railway boundary stone”.

The Northern Echo: Hartburn

But the S&DR didn’t run through this district.

Instead, beside the club, is the trackbed of the Castle Eden Railway, which the North Eastern Railway built in 1877 to join Bowesfield Junction at Stockton with the maze of east Durham railways in the Wingate area and then eventually to Castle Eden.

This was known as the “Cuckoo Railway”, apparently because the area used to be a guaranteed haunt of the cuckoo.

The main piece of infrastructure on the line was the 22 arch Thorpe Thewles viaduct, made of eight million bricks.

The line never really carried passengers, only minerals like coal, and closed in 1951. The viaduct was demolished in 1979 and the only station, Thorpe Thewles, is now the café at the start of the walkway which occupies the trackbed.

But there wasn’t a Cuckoo Railway boundary stone beside the bowls club, either.

The Northern Echo: Hartburn

Instead, there was the upper portion of what had once been “a handsome stone drinking fountain and cattle-trough”.

A metal plaque says that it was “erected by Charles Arthur Head, Hartburn Hall, 1886”.

The Northern Echo: Hartburn

Mr Head had co-founded the famous ironworks Head Wrightson at South Stockton in 1866. Head Wrightson built railway bridges and then boilers around the world, employing 6,000 people at its peak. The works closed in 1984, allowing Margaret Thatcher to take her famous “walk in the wilderness” across the site’s post-industrial wasteland in 1987 (below).

The Northern Echo: HartburnREAD MORE: RETRACING MAGGIE'S WALK IN THE WILDERNESS

Mr Head lived near the bowls club although his hall was demolished in the 1930s and replaced by Jesmond Grove.

The Northern Echo: HartburnThe fountain on the left where the Darlington Road in Hartburn goes over the trackbed of the Cuckoo Railway

In his day, the road dropped and turned quite considerably to cross the Cuckoo Railway, so perhaps he installed the drinking fountain to allow the horses hauling heavy loads some refreshment.

Over time, the road has been raised, and, rather disappointingly, Mr Head’s fountain has been buried so that only the very top of it peeks above pavement. Does the rest of this once handsome edifice lie beneath the ground, waiting for someone with imagination to restore it as a roadside feature?

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