Bells that echoed sound of the medieval miners

It is a leftover from another age, when heavily-laden pack-ponies crawled across the surface of the earth and men crawled on their bellies along tiny tunnels.

We left the Gaunless Valley last week in the 13th Century, having zipped through 20,000 years of history - a history that is common to much of south Durham.

In the 13th Century, most of the valley was owned either by the Prince Bishop of Durham or by the King of England.

In 1303, Bishop Anthony Bek began to allow people to scrape and mine for coal and iron ore in his Gordon and Evenwood Park - a deer hunting park that covered most of the area.

A geological accident, known as the Butterknowle Fault, throws several good seams of coal to the surface in the valley, so it was easily mined.

The monks of Finchale Abbey were mining at Softley from 1354. John de Merley was paying the Bishop £22-a-year to mine at Evenwood from 1388, and there was mining at Copley from 1450. On Cockfield Fell, from 1375, William Vavasour, of Cockfield Hall, had a "carbonum maritimorum" - a proper colliery, possibly the first of its kind in the country in an inland location.

Aside from Vavasour, the early miners had two techniques. They cut a trench sideways into the fell to form a drift mine and followed the seam with their spades, or they dug a hole downwards until they found the seam about 30ft or 40ft underground. As they scrabbled around collecting the coal, the hole widened out into the shape of a bell.

These bell pits were usually worked by a single man who lowered himself down on a rope. Once he had burrowed outwards as far as he dared before the roof fell in, he hauled himself out and began again, tossing the soil from his new pit down the neck of the old one.

There are about 400 bell pits on Cockfield Fell, and probably the same number of drift mines. Over the centuries, the bell pits have collapsed, leaving round, lunar-like indentations on the surface of the fell. As you walk across them, it is impossible not to wonder how many miners' skeletons lie below, their limbs frozen in horror as the roof fell in on their world 600 years ago.

But these indentations are not the only remains of this early industry. In 1964, at Low Butterknowle, a bell pit dating from the 13th or 14th Century was found, and at the bottom were discovered four medieval cooking pots.

Quite how they got there, no one knows. Even if a miner 600 years ago fancied a quick cup-a-soup, he would not require four cooking pots, particularly not of such quality as those found.

The guess is that a thief made off with the brass and bronze pots from a nearby hall and thought that the bottom of a disused bell pit was a fine place to stash his booty until he could sell it on.

For whatever reason, he never returned. The pots, known as the Butterknowle Cauldrons, are now on display at the Bowes Museum, near Barnard Castle.

At about the time of this theft, Ralph Neville, the Earl of Westmorland and Lord of Raby, bought the Manor of Cockfield, Raby Castle and Barnard Castle from the king.

But 160 years later, his descendant, Charles Neville, the sixth earl, lost the lot when he backed the wrong side in the Rising of the North of 1569, and Queen Elizabeth I confiscated all his land.

Charles escaped with his life, but 15 men from Cockfield were hanged in the village for their part in the rebellion.

It left Elizabeth with a large part of the valley on her hands. She offered it to the Bishop of Durham, but he refused, saying: "The pyttes and mynes are wrought out and no coales there to be gotten nor any pyttes in worke within these places at present".

Eventually, in 1624, King James I managed to off-load the lot to Sir Henry Vane for £18,000.

This was now the agricultural age, with vast swathes of the countryside being enclosed by landlords for farming.

Cockfield Fell, pitted with workings, appears to have been too dangerous for the Vanes to have enclosed. Its extraordinary landscape escaped the plough, and it is now the largest ancient monument in the North.

But despite the Bishop's pessimism and the Vanes' interest in farming, coal mining continued in the Gaunless Valley.

One of Beamish Museum's most fragile possessions is an 18th Century wooden cart discovered beneath Cockfield Fell by opencast miners in the early 1980s.

"It is little more than a rollerskate underneath a shopping basket," said Jim Rees, keeper of industry at Beamish Museum, where the cart - technically a corve rolly - lives in the Regional Resource Centre.

"It is very, very rare, but one loud sneeze and it would just fly into bits," he said.

The rolly probably dates from about 1790, and a miner would have pulled it to and from the coal face along flat wooden rails. On top of it would have been a corve - a wicker basket filled with coal.

Once the corve was full, it would have been hoisted to the surface by rope, and its contents placed on to a pack-pony to carry to market.

The geological fault might have made coal easy to come by in the valley, but its geographical fault meant that the coalfield was a long trek from the markets of Darlington, Durham or Newcastle.

"Considerably under 100 coal-workmen were all that were engaged in the district getting coals, and the whole produce of this important coalfield was carried away, and a portion of it to very distant markets too, either in carts or on the backs of mules or asses," a St Helen Auckland miner wrote of the Gaunless' industry in 1800.

"Large numbers of them, taking the bye-roads in order to secure a little of the scanty herbage, and avoid the payment of gates, were, in those days, to be met, carrying two or three bags of coals each. They frequently found their way to a distance of 50 miles from the pits where, from the excellent quality of the coal, a ready market was found."

Because of this difficulty, much of the Gaunless Valley's coal was dropped over the hill in Teesdale, where it was used to fire the furnaces producing lead.

Having sold their coal, the pack-horses returned from Teesdale with empty panniers. This was not good business.

Then one of the Vane family in Raby Castle had an idea. The family was awash with free lead ore, because the Teesdale lead miners were required to pay a tithe to their landlord.

The Vanes decided to carry the lead to the coal, rather than the other way around, and in the late-18th Century built a lead smelting mill in Copley. Now the pack-ponies trudged back from Eggleston Common and Middleton-in-Teesdale with panniers laden with lead ore. Silvery bits of it fell out on the journey and their track became known as Steele Road, which is still a well-used footpath between the dales. Today, only a couple of buildings from the Copley mill remain, although on the hill beside it is the chimney, which carried off the poisonous fumes. It still stands 115ft high - a monument to an age of travel difficulties

Published: ??/??/2002

Echo Memories, The Northern Echo, Priestgate, Darlington DL1 1NF, e-mail chris.lloyd@nne.co.uk or telephone (01325) 505062.