AN award-winning museum's latest attraction provides visitors with an insight into life during the 1820s in the North-East.

Beamish Museum, near Stanley, County Durham, has unveiled a feature that shows what the landscape of the region was like almost 200 years ago.

It harks back to an era when collieries and railways were first changing the face of County Durham.

The idea is to reflect what the Georgian countryside looked like prior to industrialisation.

Several fields have been transformed with ridge and furrow ploughing, which was a key element to farming from medieval times.

The technique enabled farmers to grow different varieties of crops in the same field with dry conditions on the ridges and wet in the furrows.

Hedgerows have been planted and sown with thousands of wild flower seeds of the period to complete the effect.

There is also the recreation of an 1820s colliery, complete with its own wood waggonway.

Museum director Miriam Harte said: "We hope people will be to see how the landscape has changed over time.

"It is important to see what we have come from and how we have developed as part of our understanding of social history."

The project has been made possible thanks to a £120,000 grant from the County Durham Environmental Trust (CDENT) through the Landfill Tax Credit Scheme.

Chairman of CDENT John Wearmouth said: "Museum visitors will be able to ride behind the replica steam engines and look out on to fields reminiscent of those seen by the first travellers on the railways almost two centuries ago."