MUSEUM curator Robin Hildyard took a walk down memory lane yesterday to recapture moments of a "blissful childhood".

After reopening the village hall in the tiny village of Eastgate, in Weardale, County Durham, he went on to stay at the Victorian mansion of Horsley Hall where he was born.

It was the first time that Mr Hildyard, assistant curator in English pottery at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, had revisited his birthplace in ten years.

The reopening of the village hall, formerly the village school, represented two years of dedicated fundraising by the people of Eastgate. It cost more than £150,000 to refurbish, with most of the money coming from the National Lottery's Community Fund.

The chairman of the village hall association, farmer Bill Wearmouth, paid tribute to all those who had helped with the effort.

He said: "This is the hub of village life. Despite all the trauma we are having to face because of foot-and-mouth, it proves that village life is still very much alive and thriving."

The former school and nearby church were both gifted to the village by Robin Hildyard and his brother, Martin, on the death of their father, Edward, in 1964.

So it was appropriate that Mr Hildyard, who now lives in Hertfordshire, should be asked to perform the reopening ceremony, attended by nearly every resident of Eastgate.

The Hildyards, wealthy landowners from Hutton Bonville, near Danby Wiske, North Yorkshire, built Horsley Hall in the 1860s. It was mainly used for entertaining grouse shooting parties.

But, as social and industrial patterns changed, the Hildyards found they could no longer make the estate pay. The 6,000 acres of land were sold for £50,000 in 1954 by Edward Hildyard.

The hall, however, fetched only £900, being sold to a local quarry owner.

As he wandered around the hall - now an impressive hotel and restaurant - Mr Hildyard said he still had "very strong impressions and dreams of Weardale".

He said: "We had a blissful childhood. The tiny church school, which I attended until I was nine years old, only had about a dozen pupils. I can remember the school dinners arriving in a van and being poured out from churn-like containers. They were dreadful."