A LITTLE piece of Georgian England has been recreated at the Beamish Museum.

The 1820s country landscape, with riven oak field gates, stone gateposts and stone flagging, has been built at the museum, near Gateshead, with a £120,000 grant from the County Durham Environmental Trust.

Four fields at the museum have been transformed with ridge and furrow ploughing - a technique used from medieval times until the agricultural and industrial revolutions, when farming enclosures, collieries and early railways changed the face of the North-East.

The landscape is the latest development to the 1825 area at Beamish which is designed to reflect the region at the cusp of great economic change.

Future works at the museum, which attracts 320,000 visitors a year, will include an 1820s colliery, wooden railway, hedging and draining.

Miriam Harte, director of the museum, said: "This will allow Beamish to represent a lost landscape from the days when the region's creativity was about to change the North-East and most of the wider world forever."

John Wearmouth, chairman of County Durham Environmental Trust, said: "Museum visitors will now be able to ride behind the replica steam engines and look out on to fields reminiscent of those seen by the first railway travellers almost two centuries ago. But this landscape is not just for pleasure. It will also demonstrate what can be achieved by farmers with natural fertilisers using local materials and methods from pre-industrial days.