ALL the talk in town was about the steelworks.

Disbelief, disquiet, despair - the emotions poured out as the people of Wolsingham, in Weardale, tried to come to terms with the fact that nearly 150 years of steelmaking may be about to be consigned to the scrapheap.

As they went about their Saturday shopping in Market Place, which is in the throws of a regeneration programme to attract new businesses and visitors, families reflected on the news that the steel plant was in administration.

"This is something I still can't get my head around," said councillor and shopkeeper Vere Shuttleworth. "It came like a bombshell. It doesn't make any sense."

Less than two months ago, the works, founded by steel pioneer Charles Attwood in 1862, were taken over by a firm called Eastwood Industries, said to be based in the Midlands. They promised to expand markets and move into new technology.

Then, last Thursday, the administrators moved in. Fifty- four workers were made redundant with another 29 being kept on to complete existing contracts.

The news was overlooked by many newspapers because it came on the same day American power tool giant Black & Decker announced 950 jobs were to go in Spennymoor.

But the effects for Wolsingham are just as devastating as Black & Decker's decision to switch production to the Czech Republic.

Weardale is already reeling from the closure of the Blue Circle cement works earlier this year. "It's a staggering blow for the whole community," said Councillor Shuttleworth. "It doesn't make any sense. What I can't understand is that a firm, which appears to have very little assets, is allowed to take over the steelworks, then as quickly as it appears, it disappears leaving a trail of disaster. The whole thing has collapsed like a pack of cards

"Something will have to be done - and quickly - to sort out this mess."

He, and other business people in Wolsingham, feels deeply for those workers who came home from the steelworks on Thursday to tell their families they had not been paid for two weeks, and there was no holiday or redundancy pay.

Several of them, with mortgages and young families, have already been to social security offices to seek emergency payments. The bulk of the workers will be signing on today for benefits.

In the pubs and the working men's club in Wolsingham at the weekend steelworkers and their friends talked about what had happened at the steelworks, which in the late 1950s employed more than 600 men.

The club, formerly the Mechanics Institute, has been inexorably linked to the steelworks since it was founded, with workers in the early days having to contribute a penny of their weekly pay towards its upkeep.

Kenny Lally, club chairman and union shop steward at the works, said: "It's bound to affect the social side of family life here. It's so unfair."

Over the Market Place at the Black Bull pub, where former steelworkers have just held their annual leek show, landlord John McGinnety said: "It is very, very sad."

At one time - when the steelworks was at full production - there were as many as 12 pubs in Wolsingham. Now there are only four.