THE phone rings. Nothing unusual about that except it's 1877 and such a contraption has barely been invented. On one end of the line, singing Auld Lang Syne, is eminent scientist and inventor of telecommunications equipment, Alexander Graham Bell. On the other, down a North-East coal mine, a bunch of workers.

The sound is muted but audible. God Save the Queen, The Last Rose of Summer, and a quick piano recital, performed 500 yards away in a country house in Ryton, miraculously transmitted down a piece of wire, of all things, and listened to 500 yards away by an awe-struck audience down the mine.

"The words were distinctly audible and the intonation and recognition of each individual voice were easily recognised," was how the momentous event was recorded by the owner of Hedgefield House, John Bell Simpson.

"Conversations were kept up quite easily. The mouth of the speaker at one end and the ear of the listener at the other required to be closely applied to the instrument at each end. There can be no doubt, from the experiments of today, that the telephone promises to be capable of useful application in mines for many purposes and will, on the surface as well as underground, be of immense use."

Since then, telephones have come on a bit and so has the country house, now a smart little hotel run by retired deputy head David Wood, who, until recently, was oblivious of his property's claim to fame.

David bought the house three years ago as a "nice place to live" but, for the past 12 months, has run it as a small hotel. It was during renovations of its cellar that he discovered the documentation chronicling the historic event.

'We wanted a gym and TV lounge and were poking around the cellar," recalls David, who was a teacher for 25 years, retiring as deputy head of a school in Bedlington, Northumberland, nine years ago. "There are five rooms, they were full of junk. We were clearing one of the rooms when we stumbled across this lot. The room was obviously a strongroom, it was piled high."

Until then, he knew the house had been owned by the Simpsons and was linked to nearby Addison mine. The booklet he found revealed the story of Bell and his telephone experiments - the fact that it was the first house in Britain, and the first mine in the world, to have a phone.

"It will have been a box of wires, just a tangle," says Cramlington-born David. "Funnily, I have always had a fascination for phones, so it was amazing to find this."

Bell was born in Edinburgh, and the fascination with words and communications dominated his family life. His mother was deaf and his father invented visible speech, or signing. In 1866, he carried out a series of experiments combining the notes of electrically-driven tuning forks to make vowel sounds, giving him the idea of telegraphing speech. The death of his brothers from tuberculosis drove the family to Canada and, in 1871, they settled in Boston, America.

There Bell enlisted the skills of Thomas Watson from a nearby electrical shop and they worked together on harmonic telegraphy. In June 1875, they managed to transmit the sound of a plucked reed over a wire. The following day, they transmitted sounds made by Bell and, in 1876, a patent on the invention was issued.

In 1877, he travelled to England with his wife Mabel, and in the same year he established the Bell Telephone Company. In September of that year, Bell attended the annual conference of the Iron and Steel Industry of Great Britain, which was held at Newcastle Town Hall. He demonstrated his early telephones there and was approached by JB Simpson, who was considered the foremost mining engineer in the country. The experiment at Addison pit was arranged for September 20. And the rest is history.

Now, David hopes his home's new-found claim to fame will attract visitors, particularly from America where Bell is a favourite son.

The house is set in beautiful grounds and is a little bit of countryside within urban Newcastle. It's 15 minutes from Hadrian's Wall, three miles from Newcastle City Centre, two miles from the A1 and five minutes walk from the Metro.

The hotel should be right up the Americans' street, with typically English charm, a host of antiques and, eventually, a telephone museum. David's phone should never stop ringing.

l David can be contacted at Hedgefield House, Stella Road, Ryton. Telephone 0191-413 7373 or 0958 304942.