IT WAS coal-fired, kitchen-ranged, contented. It had oil lamps and long tables, ham and eggs still savoured in sweet memory, metal dominoes so big and so clacketty that when they were shuffled you couldn't hear yourself speak.

Sometimes it might close a little after its time and sometimes quite a lot. How fondly readers remember the Cat Hole at Keld, how eagerly they recall its nine lives.

Keld is near Swaledale's western extreme, where Pennine Way and Coast-to-Coast Walk meet. The Cat Hole, curiously named, was the village pub until 1954 when Methodist local preacher Jim Alderson bought it, barred it, banished the demon drink for ever.

"We'd cycle up there getting on 60 years ago," recalls Bob Pendlebury from Crook, deputy leader of Durham County Council. "Supper, bed and breakfast was 3/6d at Keld youth hostel, that's how long ago it was, so we usually had something left for a pint. You'd sit in the kitchen, it wasn't really a bar at all. It was friendly and welcoming and there were real ructions on when it closed."

Joe Woodhouse in Hurworth Place, near Darlington, was another youthful hosteller, still has his 1944 YHA card, duly stamped. They'd head up there, perhaps appropriately, with Spartan Wheelers.

"We were only 16 but we were made very welcome. Probably we only drank shandy and played dominoes with the locals. It was boisterous but nothing out of hand, just a typical country pub really. After a few drinks we'd be running back up the hill, because the hostel locked its door on the stroke of ten."

Also among those with affectionate memories is former Northern Echo walks writer Charlie Emmett, now 80 and still striding out. The Cat Hole before the war was run by Harriet Hutchinson, his aunt, who died there when she was 94.

Another aunt ran a pub in Warrington where Mr John Prescott, who rose to higher things, did the washing up before going to sea. Some, of course, would say that he's still there.

"The land outside the Cat Hole sloped down the valley with earth closets at the bottom," recalls Charlie. "There were a lot of chapel people around Keld who didn't drink, but those who did came to the pub quite a lot. There was absolute uproar when they closed it."

IT WAS renamed Hope House, a home for the Aldersons and also a village shop and filling station. Revival meetings were held there, too. Fifty years and unfathomable leaps later, the Hole truth is now debated worldwide across the Internet.

The first pub had been in Cat Hole Cottages, was later renamed the Miners Arms and again became the Cat Hole when the later building was erected.

"Swaledale", a pre-war guide by Ella Pontefract and Marie Hartley, described the pub as standing at the top of the hill "like a sentinel guarding the way to the village".

Among "many explanations" for the name, the authors favoured the theory that the area was once the home of wild cats. Charlie Emmett thinks it local dialect, but can't remember the story.

Jim Alderson died in 2004, aged 81, also remembered for a 1970s letter to the Darlington & Stockton Times in which he described the local ladies' darts league as a "sea of unfaithfulness". His widow, 80 in April, still lives in Hope House.

Martin Hall, self-styled "God fearing Methodist" and Jim Alderson's grandson-in-law, said on the Internet last December that it was "most unlikely" that the family would ever sell Hope House, less likely still that it would ever again become a pub.

Martin's father John, still farming in Keld, echoes the view. The shop and filling station have gone, the people have gone, the youth hostel closes shortly.

"Keld is dead. There's nothing left," he tells the column. "If I wasn't farming, I wouldn't be here myself. There'll never be another pub."

JOHN Briggs in Darlington finds on the Internet a 1926 poem by John Grey called The Long Road. The poem is yet longer than the road and probably twice as tedious.

Part is lengthy recitation of pub names. Only one gives a location. It is, of course, the Cat Hole, Keld.

THE debate is joined by John Stubbs, now near Leeds but originally from Witton Park, near Bishop Auckland, and an old boy of Bishop Auckland Grammar School. "I still have my school atlas somewhere with your name in it," he says.

John's uncle - and this is a drop-dead digression - was Jossy Stubbs from Toft Hill, once among the Hear All Sides column's most prolific and knowledgeable correspondents. His muse, it's reckoned, could usually be found with a pint of Bentley's Yorkshire Bitter in the Dog and Gun at Etherley.

John's family were Milners, once any amount of them in Swaledale. An ancestor was a servant girl at the Cat Hole in the 1840s - then run by another, presumably less abstemious, member of the Alderson family.

In 1861 there were around 50 Milners in Keld alone. By the time of the 1871 census, there were none.

Behind all that lies an intriguing and truly scandalous story involving one of the region's best known and most aristocratic families. For the moment we are sworn to secrecy. The Cat's far enough out of the bag already.

LAST week's column also talked of the Tan Hill Inn, England's highest, a couple of miles further up the dale. It was run, Bob Pendlebury recalls, by an old lady in a long black skirt.

Alan Archbold from Sunderland, another Tan Hill irregular, sends a copy of a Dalesman publication in which is recalled the fearful winter of 1947.

Harry Earnshaw, the then landlord, is reputed to have wished "Happy New Year" to a shepherd who called by in April for a drink - his first customer that year.

The story is also told of a farmer who came in during a Swaledale blizzard, insisting that he'd only have a half because he had the wife outside.

"Bring the poor lass in, she'll be frozen to death," urged the kindly barman.

"I can't do that," said the farmer, finishing his drink. "She's deed already and aa'm tekkin' her to't undertaker on't sledge."

All at sea over puzzling trinity

FORMER members of all three armed forces are united - slanged to rights - after last week's note on Pongo, Jack and Crabfat, a somewhat unholy trinity.

It was the name, it may be recalled, of a military surplus store in Hetton-le-Hole, a recovering colliery town between Durham and Sunderland.

All agree that they are nicknames used by different branches of the military to describe one another. It's the etymology and the level of intended offensiveness which are in dispute - especially in the case of crabfat.

Accounts vary from "less than complimentary" (Chris Bossingham, Durham) to "very derogatory" (Jim Beer, by e-mail).

"Jack" is the easiest. It's a sailor, as every man jack knows, said by some to be a reference to the pony tail with which all matelots were tarred.

"Pongo" is naval slang for a soldier. Though the learned Eric Partridge supposes that the forage cap worn by the Army resembled that of the pet dog Pongo in a Punch and Judy show, readers prefer the theory that squaddies were known to senior servicemen as Percy. "Wherever Percy goes, the pong goes."

So what of crabfat? Chris Bossingham, ex-RAMC, supposes that the uniforms given to the newly formed RAF after the First World War had been in storage a long time. Though dyeing changed the colour, it did nothing about the crab lice in the seams. Hence crabs.

Dennis Clark - "a bronze age Telegraph reader" - reckons that RAF uniforms were simply crab fat grey; Eric Middleton in Ferryhill ("ex-Jack Tar") seconds the amendment.

"I don't think," he adds discreetly, "that crabfat was meant as a compliment." Jim Beer's explanation is less complimentary still, and therefore cannot be printed.

The shop remains shuttered. A website gives details of Pongo, Jack and Crabfat in Seaham Harbour but offers an unobtainable number; the phone book lists another address in Seaham and a number which doesn't accept incoming calls.

It may not be terribly good for business. Surplus to requirements.

NO doubt a first, the John North column was also floated at the monthly meeting of the Darlington branch of the Royal Navy Association.

All right, jack? Well actually, they're treading water a bit. Usually six old tars turn out. Last week there were seven, close to a record.

"We meet and swing the lamp a little, talk about past times and past ships, enjoy a drink or two and a tot or two," reports Stan Johnson, the chairman.

He'd love to welcome more ex-naval men aboard. Stan's on (01325) 350206.

CHRIS Bossingham also reckons that sailors refer to the Royal Navy as the Andrew - after Lt Andrew Miller, said to be so successful an 18th century press gangster that half the complement were his unwitting recruits.

Etymologists wouldn't bet the king's shilling on it. "Documentary evidence of his actual existence has not yet been found," says one of the websites.

This gang-of-one must now set sail elsewhere. The ship's company returns next week.