Mansion renovation reveals some tantalising clues to village's past

Their fascination has been rewarded because beneath the elderly plasterwork - some of which was no more than lime and horsehair - is an outline of a long-forgotten history.

The most pleasing is the re-appearance of what was probably Hurworth's first school; the most tantalising is the re-emergence of a bell tower, which once might have tolled news of the appearance of another dead body on the river.

Dovercourt is the curiously castellated building towards the east end of Hurworth's green. It was bought in December by Steve and Susan Holding, who were told that the rendering had to come off because damp was seeping in behind it, doing untold damage.

When the garage was scraped clean, two arched windows were revealed. They fit neatly with a description of the village's first school, written in 1906: "The school was the small, two windowed building still adjoining the entrance doorway of Mr Scurfield's riverside garden, and flanked on the other side by an old-fashioned castellated house over-looking the green."

George Scurfield was the squire of Hurworth. For most of the second half of the 19th Century he lived in Hurworth House (now a private school), and his front garden ran down to the Tees beside Dovercourt.

On July 22, 1770, the villagers decided to build a school on a plot of wasteland beside the river garden. There is a suggestion that this wasteland was once the site of an ancient chapel that pre-dated the 15th Century All Saints Church (the church as we know it today was rebuilt in 1871). Part of the village green used to be known as Chapel Green as a nod to the one-time chapel.

For their school, the villagers collected £128 7s, and obtained £148 17s 6d from the Lord Crewe Trust. With their money, they bought four fields in Melsonby and one in Hurworth. The rent from these fields provided enough income to keep the school running.

In the late 1820s, the single-room school was proving too small, and the village notables began preparing to build a bigger one.

On June 12, 1829, a new set of trustees was formed to transfer the school's finances - and its fields - to the new site at the top of Blind Lane (opposite the Spar shop).

In Dovercourt's deeds, there is a mention of a peculiar arrangement that was signed on March 14, 1829. Some of the steep riverbank passed into its possession from the trustees. On one terrace, the new owners were prohibited from putting up "any erection edifice or building or erection edifices or building whatsoever".

We can only guess at why this small plot of land should be so special to the trustees, and it is only a guess that this was the site of the ancient chapel.

But this is just one of the mysteries of Dovercourt. Behind the garage that might once have been the first school, stands a tall watertower. Its top is covered with ivy, but it seems to have been built as a folly by the Scurfields.

All the way down the 50ft drop to the River Tees are stone troughs and waterways, and it is believed that in late Victorian times the Scurfields' riverside garden was alive to the sound of trickling water as it cascaded from the tower down to the river.

On its way, the water passed an icehouse dug deep into the riverbank. In winter, ice was collected from the river and stored for summer. Icehouses were quite rare in Darlington: only the mansions of Pierremont and Polam had them.

On the riverbank is an old boathouse and jetty. In the deep water are remains of an old wooden stockade, and the jetty is made from stone sleepers laid for the Stockton and Darlington Railway in 1825.

Here starts the tantalising side of the Dovercourt story. Running back up the riverbank is an old alleyway (now blocked off) which is known as Knell Gate.

Hurworth was badly affected by the plague in 1645. "The Lord struck three-and-forty people here in this month of July, near all in this town, viz Hurworth," say old documents. The parish registers are more telling.

The Reverend Thomas Thompson, rector of Hurworth, recorded the names of his parishioners as they succumbed to the disease. As he scratched down their names over the weeks, his handwriting became weaker.

Eventually, the firm hand of the vicar of Eryholme takes over to note the death and burial of Mr Thompson.

The dead were buried in plague pits on the village green. Some sources suggest that one pit was at the top of Blind Lane; others advise you to look closely at the green itself. It undulates quite sweetly, until you realise that the large indentations could simply be where the land has settled over the bodies of the victims.

Bits of human skeletons quite regularly turn up when the green is dug up - particularly at the Blind Lane end. In Victorian times, the remains of two armed men were supposed to have been uncovered directly outside Dovercourt - but as that does not fit in with our plague theory, we will gloss over it.

The story goes that the boatman would collect the dead from places like Dalton and Eryholme and ferry them to the jetty at the foot of Dovercourt. He would then drag them up the alleyway known as Knell Gate and leave them on the green near the plague pit. Then he would toll a bell to let the villagers know of the fresh arrivals.

The sound of the bell gave the alleyway its name; it also gave the boatman time to escape, because he would not want to meet any inhabitants of this plague-stricken place who might contaminate him.

It had always been assumed that the bell was in the steeple of All Saints Church. But with Dovercourt's rendering removed, it is clear that on the wing nearest to Knell Gate there are the remains of a tower which once had open arches at its top, designed as if to allow the sound of a bell to ring out. Could the two be connected?

There is another theory about why Knell Gate is so called. It is said that when William the Conqueror did his conquering in 1066, he was desperate to suppress the native Saxons. In Hurworth, his representatives were the Tailbois family, to whom there is a memorial in All Saints. The Tailbois imposed a curfew upon the villagers, and when they rang the curfew bell beside Knell Gate, everyone had to be tucked up in bed rather than out plotting.

All of which is filled in rather sketchily from the outlines of history that were revealed last week on Dovercourt. This week, as long as the weather behaves, they are being covered back up again as new rendering goes on.

We also know that in the 1890s, William Sergeant lived in the house. In the 1900s, it was occupied by Edward Augustus Weiner (gentleman). He was followed in the 1920s by Thomas John Sheffield, and in the 1930s by L Patterson. Just before the Second World War, John Dodds moved in, followed by his son James, a land agent, who died in 1990, leaving an estate worth £1.4m.

Any information on any of them is most welcome. Any information on any of our guesses about Hurworth's past is also warmly invited.

And one final mystery: for over 100 years Dovercourt has been known as Dovercourt. Why? The only other Dovercourt that Echo Memories knows anything about is the holiday camp on the Essex coast, where the BBC's comedy series Hi-De-Hi was filmed. But even we can't find a link with that.

l With thanks to Ernie Hodgson for his help