Bearpark Colliery and its village were located on a hill, quarter of a mile south west of Beau Repaire.

The terraces of the colliery village have now gone and the heart of Bearpark is now situated alongside the main road from Durham, another quarter of a mile to the south.

The area along this road once formed a separate hamlet called Auton Stile that was itself an extension of another hamlet called Aldin Grange to the east.

Both places originated in medieval times. Aldin Grange is still a farm and hamlet that was originally called Aldingrig meaning Alda's ridge. Early spellings of Auton Stile suggest that Auton was Alda's farm, but who Alda was is not known.

Stile suggests there was a gate and steps across the roadway.

Aldin Grange manor belonged to the Bishops of Durham until the twelfth century but passed to the monks of Baxter Wood and later Finchale Priory. From the 1600s, the land and its H-shaped manor house belonged to a series of farming families before passing in the nineteenth century to the Cochrane family who owned New Brancepeth Colliery.

When the Cochranes moved to Eshwood Hall in 1874, Aldin Grange Hall, as it had become known, was broken up into a number of smaller cottages.

Mining has been carried out in the Bearpark area since the 1300s when it was recorded that the Prior of Durham had pit workings at Beau Repaire.

The Prior agreed to be supplied with coal from a neighbouring mine at Broom (Broompark), providing that the Broom workings did not damage those at Beau Repaire.

Medieval mining was on a small scale and although a drift was mentioned at Bearpark in 1854, the mining possibilities were not fully realised until the North Eastern Railway opened the Lanchester Valley Railway through the Browney Valley in 1862.

Bearpark Colliery was commenced ten years later in 1872. Its underground workings encompassed most of the old Beau Repaire estate.

Bearpark Coal and Coke Company owned the colliery, headed by a Quaker called Theodore Fry. He was a Darlington Ironmaster who later became that town's mayor and MP.

Fry's directors included several Teesside and south Durham industrialists who were attracted by Bearpark's high quality coking coal.

Bearpark coke was ideally suited to their industrial purposes and came to be internationally recognised as a quality standard.

The coke was produced at a coke works next to the colliery until the works closed in 1960. The works used coal produced at the colliery as well as coal from Burnhope Colliery near Lanchester. Coal was brought from Burnhope by means of a four and a half-mile aerial ropeway.

Chemical by-products produced at Bearpark colliery like tar, crude benzole, napthalene and sulphate of ammonia were also important and it was significant that Samuel Sadler the founder of Teesside's Chemical industry was a Bearpark director from 1877.

The colliery village had eight terraces each with 30 miners' houses. Six of the terraces called Fry, Bouch, Dodds, Dyson, Thompson and Swan Streets, were named after colliery directors.

The other two, Edmund and Catherine Street were named after chapels at Broom and Beau Repaire.

All these streets have since been demolished and are now an empty field, but nearby Bearpark Colliery Road marks the site of an even earlier colliery terrace called Sinkers Row that housed the men who sunk the colliery.

A school was built near the terraces in 1877 for 400 pupils and is now a primary school. Three Methodist chapels opened near the school in the 1880s and 1890s, although one was replaced by a new building in 1908.

All gradually fell out of use and were replaced by a new chapel in the Auton Stile area of Bearpark in 1969. This area is also home to Bearpark's parish church that opened back in 1879.

Like the old chapel at Beau Repaire, it is dedicated to St Edmund.

In the 1850s there were few buildings in Auton except for three houses called Auton Field, Auton House and Auto Stile. There was also a coaching inn called the Sportsman but this was renamed the Dog and Gun later before the end of the nineteenth century and still exists today.

Some housing development associated with industrial growth took place along the main road at Aldin Grange Terrace in Auton Stile before or during the 1890s but Aldin Grange itself retained its rural setting and still does today.

The bridge over the Browney at Aldin Grange is famed as the place where David King of Scots was found hiding after the Battle of Nevilles Cross in 1346.

When Bearpark railway station opened in 1883 between Auton and Aldin Grange the North Eastern Railway called it Aldin Grange Station, but Bearpark residents protested and it was rather cumbersomely renamed Aldin Grange for Bearpark.

The name was eventually simplified to Bearpark until 1927 but was only used for twelve years as the station closed in 1939. The railway itself closed in 1966 and is now the Lanchester Valley Walk.

Urban growth in the early years of the twentieth century took place mainly along Victor Terrace and South View Terrace near the main road. There was considerable development in the fifties and sixties between these streets spurred on by the demolition of the old colliery terraces that lay to the north.

Newly constructed streets like Kingston and Ritson Avenues were amongst the first of many. Despite the changes Bearpark colliery itself continued to operate and did not finally close until 1984. The land has been reclaimed and is now a woodland plantation looking out towards the ancient ruins of Beau Repaire.

If you have memories of Durham you would like to share with The Northern Echo, write to David Simpson, Durham Memories, The Northern Echo, Priestgate, Darlington, DL1 1NF. Email David.Simpson@nne. co. uk or telephone (01325) 505098.

Published: 05/03/2004