New book celebrates the lost country homes of south Durham

Author Ian Greaves in his new book Lost Country Houses of the North East has identified 100 lost houses in County Durham and 120 in Northumberland, many created by the finest architects of the day: John Carr, Ignatius Bonomi, John Dobson, Daniel Garrett...

Some were undermined, like the amazing Ravensworth Castle at Gateshead, which Ian identifies as the greatest loss to the region. Others, like Streatlam Castle, near Barnard Castle, were blown up by the Army. Most of them, though, just got too large.

Ravensworth Castle, near Gateshead, is described by Ian Greaves as being the biggest loss of the all the country houses. It was designed by John Nash for Sir Thomas Liddell and was eventually completed in 1846, although it sat inside a genuinely medieval castle. However, it suffered mining subsidence and was demolished in the early 1950s, although little bits of it – a lodge house, a gateway and the remains of a medieval tower – survive beside the A1.

"The larger houses were simply too big to survive as private homes, ill-suited to modern living and too expensive to maintain from the resources of estates drastically reduced by death duties," he says.

But once they had been the home of centuries-old families, or of people who had made a fortune through their ingenuity after the Industrial Revolution: the designer of the world's first steam-powered warship, the inventor of the electric lightbulb, the 19th Century's greatest pioneer of hydraulics and armaments...

So although the houses are lost, the life stories of the amazing people who lived in them remain, and this book ensures that the ghosts and legends that grew up around the properties are not lost either.

• Lost Country Houses of the North East by Ian Greaves is published by Amberley for £15.99.

Branksome Hall, Darlington, was built for Robert Teesdale and was originally called Westfield, but when it was enlarged by railway foundry owner John Kitching, he renamed it Branksome after the hall in the Scottish borders which Sir Walter Scott created as the setting of his 1805 epic poem, The Lay of the Last Minstrel. The house was demolished in the late 1950s, and now Darlington has a housing estate that bears a fictitious Scottish baronial nameCockerton Hall was a medieval house at the entrance of the village at the top of Woodland Road. Its last use was as a Post Office store before it was demolished in 1964. A garden centre then occupied its site until the current apartment blocks were builtHaggerston Castle on the A1 in Northumberland was a ridiculously large 154-bedroom house built in the early 1890s by Christopher Naylor-Leyland, who had added "Leyland" to his surname to inherit his great-uncle's shipbuilding fortune, which he lavished on creating this enormity with a great hall 84ft by 40ft and a water tower 153ft high. It was ravaged by fire in 1911 and restored, but Christopher's son, also Christopher, could not hope to sustain it. He lived in a small part of it, and sold the rest off. The bulk of it was pulled down in the mid-1930s, although the water tower survives to look down on the caravan site which now occupies the estate. Other features from the lost castle can also be found amid the caravans: statues from an Italianate Garden, an icehouse and an animal house which was once part of Christopher's private zoo

Hawthorn Tower, at the top of Hawthorn Dene at Easington, was an extraordinary-looking creation designed by the renowned Newcastle architect John Dobson – think railway station, Grainger Market, Grey Street – and built in 1821 for Major George Anderson. It was far too large to survive in the 20th Century, and after the Boys' Brigade and the military had used it, it was abandoned. It was demolished in 1969 after a partial collapse killed a child

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Hoppyland Hall, near Hamsterley, is one of Memories' favourite lost houses because of the stories attached to it. It was restored after a fire in 1793 so that it was full of Gothic towers and battlements. It was in one of those towers that George Blenkinsopp locked his wife of 20 years, Harriet, so that he could continue to cavort with Jane Longstaff, his mistress from Hamsterley. Hannah eventually escaped from her tower, where she had been left without food or heating, and was discovered by villagers in a very distressed state. She sued for divorce in 1841, but her horrible husband placed everything he owned, a part from the clothes he wore and his pet monkey called Jacky, in a trust and fled to Scotland to escape the English law. He refused to pay Hannah her dues, saying all he owned was his clothes and his monkey. But on October 6, 1846, Jacky died in Holyrood Palace at Edinburgh, and George felt compelled to return to Hoppyland to bury the monkey. Now monkeyless, he finally settled his divorce – although the judge condemned his “deplorable perversity” – and he remained at Hoppyland until his death in 1860. The house was gutted by fire in 1952, and is now just ivy-covered ruins, although Jacky's inscribed headstone was built into a wall about a mile away

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Lost Country Houses of the North East by Ian Greaves (Amberley, £15.99)Old Park, Whitworth, near Spennymoor, was the seat of the Wharton family, from Winston, since the late 16th Century, and they turned it into a strange Gothic-looking pile over the centuries. However, in the 1840s, Whitworth Park Colliery opened nearby, and this elderly curiosity could not survive the march of the industrial age. It was demolished in 1901Red Hall, Darlington, was the home from medieval times of famous families like the Scropes, the Pudseys, the Lambtons and the Chaytors. About 200 years ago, a skeleton of a man who had been 6ft 4ins tall with enormous teeth, was found at Red Hall, which confirmed – or perhaps created – the local legend that it had been the site of an ancient battle between two tribes, one of whom had been made of giants. Darlington council had no truck with such fancies, buying the derelict hall in 1965 but not demolishing it until 1984. Now a council estate covers the footprint of the hall and the giants' battlefieldTunstall Manor, at Hartlepool, is another of the phantasmagorical lost houses featured in the new book. It was built in 1898 for shipbuilder Sir William Gray and was a curious mixture of Scottish Baronial, Elizabethan and Moorish architecture. However, in 1919, Sir William bought Eggleston Hall, in Teesdale, for his son, Captain William Gray, as a present when he returned from the First World War. When Sir William died, the family didn't need two mansions and so, extraordinarily, Tunstall Manor was demolished in 1926. Author Ian Greaves says: "It only lasted 28 years, but had it survived a few years longer, it might have found a new use, perhaps as a hotel and one of Hartlepool's (few) architectural highlights"Twizell Castle, near Coldstream in Northumberland, shows the enormous amount of money that families frittered away on outlandish properties. For more than 100 years, various generations of Blakes, built a five storey castle, with four massive towers, overlooking the River Till. They never completed it before they demolished it in 1880, taking some of its stone to build their nearby Tillmouth Park house, which is now a hotel

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