Northern Rambler

  The Durham coalfields defined a way of life for generations. Once a hub of industrial activity, the towering and intimidating heavy machinery was visible for miles around. Not anymore. Mining has, unquestionably, left its mark on the landscape. The scars are still visible to those who look. Many former railway lines which serviced the mines are now in use as walking and cycling paths. Many towns and villages only came into existence to house the miners and their families. But the mines themselves have all but disappeared, save for those preserved as museums, such as Killhope; and those which, though disused, have been left exposed to time.   This walk takes in several former Co Durham mines: Merrington Colliery (Spennymoor Pit), an old shaft in Burton Woods and Tudhoe Mill Drift Mine. Merrington Colliery has been replaced by Burton Woods housing estate, which is passed by at (2). The nearby shaft in Burton Woods (the actual wood), needs some finding. It is off the main tra...

  I have been reading about the Brass family murders which took place in 1683 in Kirk Merrington. Andrew Mills, a servant to the Brass family who occupied a nearby farm, killed the Brass family children when their parents were on vacation. They met their ends brutally; their parents returning home to find their lifeless bodies mutilated by Mills’ axe. Mills claimed that the devil had possessed him to carry out the act; a defence which bought him little sympathy. Even if Mills was instructed by the devil, so the prevailing thinking went, he must have let the devil into his heart in the first place. Mills was convicted of murder and placed in a cage on top of a gibbet, near to what is now a Costa Coffee takeaway (until recently the Thinford Inn), on the A688. There are conflicting reports about how he died. He was hanged, that’s for sure. But it has been claimed that he was already dead by this point. The children’s grave, old and battered, still stands in the churchyard at St. John’...