SCHOOLCHILDREN have helped create a seat for weary walkers.
Pupils at Our Lady and St Thomas RC Primary, in Willington, and sculptor Phil Townsend, from Eggleston, designed and made a £4,000 seat at Willington Hill on grassland reclaimed from the Brancepeth pit heap.
Made from old railway tracks and locally-grown green oak, it is decorated with ceramic tiles featuring items from nature carved by the children.
The Minerals Valley Project funded access to the site and other works while the seat was sponsored by the Heritage Lottery Fund through English Nature.
The heap was known locally as Dante's - after the epic Italian poem Dante's Inferno - because it used to belch out a continuous stream of smoke and flames.
New native oaks, ash, hazel and cherry have now been planted on the site by 300 young people from schools in Crook, Willington and Deerness Valley through a woodlands and wildlife project run by Durham County Council.
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