Durham coal-train track walks

Gorse blooming in January! It isn't usually
out until March-April.

Finally, the wind has stopped blowing and the sun has come out. Mind you, it's still warm for January (see the gorse), so we took a walk on one of the myriad paths following old railway lines criss-crossing the landscape.

All around Newcastle are villages developed around coal mines (remember the phrase "coals to Newcastle"?). These are called "pit villages" from having a coal pit, and to move the coal to market, small coal trains were used. When Maggie Thatcher broke the coal-miners strike in 1984, most of the pits were abandoned, tracks ripped out, and slag heaps landscaped.

It is difficult to imagine what the area, now green and increasingly wooded, looked like those days: with industrial waste scattered across the hills and mine shaft facilities towering over the villages. Today, one can walk for miles on the old rail tracks along river courses, across farmland and through woods on the Deerness Valley Walk, the Lanchester Valley Walk and the Brandon-Bishop Auckland Walk – all meeting the East Coast rail line between Langley Moor and Durham.

Our walk began at Deerness View Park, and an old map of 1900 on the signboard informed us this park was the site of an old coal mine, now a picnic area. We walked the Deerness Valley, enjoying the change of weather and all the dogs out being walked.

Walking on the Esh Winning rail siding on January 6th

Coal mines were everywhere in this region. When you buy a house in Durham, you have to have it surveyed to see if it's sitting over an abandoned coal shaft. As the University tore down houses last year to construct their new administration building on Stockton Road, they found a mine shaft and had to fill it with rubble before proceeding. Other legacies of the miners are the Durham dialect (not Geordie but "pit-yakking"!), and the numerous council sports facilities that were provided by the government for out-of-work miners.