John North

EVERY time it rained heavily, the eight streets they called The Hollow were likely to flood. When they did, everyone was in the same boat. Nor was a permanently high water mark the only problem. Whole terraces, the column observed three years ago, were systematically being abandoned; houses were being wrecked.

"Cars sit on bricks and await the next one through the window, graffiti pours hatred upon the community policeman," we added in March 1999.

"This is a once proud community now known locally as Beirut. It's impossible not to understand why."

The Hollow was in Eldon Lane, or possibly Eldon Lane and Coundon Grange - two of seven barely divisible villages east of Bishop Auckland known collectively as the Dene Valley.

Now the mean streets are gone, flattened. John Raw, secretary of the Dene Valley Residents Association, insists they're taking the brute out of Beirut.

On Tuesday, a God's in his heaven morning if ever one brightly broke, we went back at his before and after invitation. "On a clear day, you can almost see the future," said John, who may have been rehearsing the line.

In the Salvation Army hall there was a meeting of the Evergreens, tea and McVities, hobnobbing over the Hobnobs. There were women only. The men, they said, were scared they'd be locked in - salvation or otherwise - and pounced upon.

The mood wasn't unanimous. There were still riff-raff, they said, still people who didn't know a broom from a bed knob but there was little doubt that Eldon Lane was at last leading somewhere.

Wyn Dines was born there, has lived in six different houses without travelling more than a few hundred yards, didn't have a place with a bath until 1979 - "I was as clean as anyone else, mind" - and is going nowhere now.

"It's home, isn't it?" she said. "There are still some very nice people around here."

Jean Morland, her friend, lives in the house where she was born 57 years ago - the village workmen's club until her grandfather bought it in 1904.

"There have been people ashamed to say they came from Eldon Lane," she said. "I've definitely never been one of them."

Her grandfather, and this bit may be considered in parenthesis, owned Pilot Coaches, which ran the first service from Bishop Auckland to West Hartlepool through Coundon and Wolviston and places.

Among Jean's souvenirs is a splendid photograph of the fleet lined up outside what she believes to be Gill's store in Bishop Auckland Market Place. Grandad sold out to the United and became an undertaker, instead.

Outside, in Eldon Lane and its neighbouring settlements, there are signs of a community stirring, and signs listing all the agencies whose money is helping the regeneration.

Old roads have been surfaced for the first time, their inhabitants properly made up, the former South Durham pub will shortly become a drop-in centre with everything from coffee bar to computer room and a new housing estate - with new drains - will, it's hoped, replace the depressed streets of The Hollow.

"Some of those houses were straight from Charles Dickens," said John Raw.

He stands down next week after four and a half years as residents' association secretary; Jean Morland succeeds him. "The whole place has been opened up now that those houses have gone," said Jean. "We've really got something to look forward to."

The Evergreens, meanwhile, plan a calendar, maybe a book, on the way things were, and are. After the Hollow, things are looking up.

BOB Smith's bus - probably he has a canny few - meanders from Durham through Kimblesworth, Segger and Witton Gilbert before alighting ultimately upon Langley Park.

It was there last Thursday that we addressed the Central Durham Women's Institutes Federation and afterwards (as they say) at the Royal Oak in Cornsay Colliery.

It's a lovely little pub run by a chap called Ian, Shildon lad originally, full of eastern artefacts brought back by his sister. There's even an Indian rug, half the size of a tennis court, which she got through as hand luggage.

The Cornsay colliers, alas, don't appreciate their real ale. With the onset of cast-a-clout weather, however, Ian's settling in his first cask beer since last September.

There's a long established naturist camp a mile or so up the road where the residents like dressing up for nothing better. Inhibitions removed, we are brothers under the skin.

PETER Davis, the Australian Vicar of Tow Law, has survived his first winter. The welcome has been warm, the weather rather less cold than he feared.

"People up here still talk about the winter of 1947, but I gather they've got off pretty lightly the past ten years," says Fr Peter.

He arrived at the end of August, sold the delights of Tow Law and the adjoining parishes of Satley and Stanley hill top by a Diocese of Durham video.

"He said he wanted somewhere near Durham, not as hot as Adelaide and with plenty of fresh air," the Archdeacon had observed. "I thought I knew just the place..."

In each of the ten days before he left Australia, the temperature topped 40 Centigrade. In Tow Law there have been many days when the mercury couldn't manage that much in Fahrenheit.

"There was a Sunday in March when I just couldn't get warm but otherwise it's been fine. I quite enjoyed the snow," he says.

Church warden Norman Deacon reckons the vicar has proved a real blessing - and at Harry Dixon's service on Monday, the Aussie embraced an English oxymoron. He does a good funeral, an' all.

THE Rev Mark Allsopp, a team vicar in Newton Aycliffe, completed the London Marathon in four hours 51 minutes. "I was going fine for about 20 miles and then discovered that it's true what they say about the wall," he reports.

"I've never known pain like it, sheer agony in the joints. If it wasn't for the encouragement of the crowd, I don't think I could have kept going."

As last week's column noted, Mark was hoping to raise funds to develop youth work at St Francis's, for which - with St Andrew's in Aycliffe Village - he has primary responsibility.

He finished despite a recent viral infection. Now that the pain has subsided a little, he even contemplates another attempt. "The atmosphere is absolutely tremendous."

Sadly, the number of positive responses from the 200 Aycliffe industrialists from whom he sought sponsorship still stands at two. "It's very disappointing. We were hoping for £2,000, now we'll have done well to reach £1,000."

They, and others, can still send cheques made payable to Great Aycliffe Parish to Mark at Burnhope Vicarage, Newton Aycliffe, Co Durham DL5 7ER.

CANON James Llewellyn Grice Hill MC, third in this trinity of clergymen, was Vicar of Hawes for 51 years, retired - aged 90 - in 1980 and died, much mourned, the following year.

He it was who claimed that his binman earned considerably more than he did, and worked more congenial hours.

We are grateful to the April edition of the Upper Wensleydale Newsletter, however, for the hitherto unknown information that not only was Canon Hill a film buff but that he considered Hedy Lamarr the world's most beautiful woman.