Hidden History - North East

Three splendid drone images by Heather Laurence Photography (and some of my own close-ups). We believe that this building was the ablutions block of the camp, based on the pipework and the circular feature, which may have been the filter bed. However,  its proximity to the building could rule that out. Potentially, there are 3 more buildings to explore. The land owners are kind and really open to us exploring the site. Happy days! We are not revealing the location as it is on private land.

Shipley Moss. We have discovered that  the quarry where the prisoners worked was owned by Stobart’s "Knitsley   Fell   Gannister Company", and the gannister was used to produce special bricks designed to stand the intense heat of iron production kilns. Thanks to Billy Francis from the UK Bricks and Brickworks Past Facebook group, we can see some of the bricks Stobarts produced for their iron blast furnaces. Thanks to  John S Alderson for the information. This wonderful group can be found at:  UK Bricks and Brickworks Past . Eastgate Thanks to a (yet another!) friendly and helpful Weardale farm owner, we managed to take these images of the ruined buildings of the site of the Eastgate POW camp. Hopefully, we will be able to undertake some archaeology at the site.

  Plate Layer’s Hut The Deerness Valley Way Railway Path runs for nearly 14 km from Broompark to Crook, following the route of the former railway, which closed in 1964 1 . There is now little to show of its industrial past, as with many parts of the Deerness valley, any such heritage has been removed or buried. Shortly after leaving Waterhouses, the path climbs steadily until it crosses the Wolsingham road. Along the track, a gate off to the left leads to an overgrown field that slopes steeply down to Stanley Beck*. Lying close to the stream are the ruins of an old building that still retains its original layout, consisting of two rooms and a small door. According to Durham Cathedral's Archaeologist and local resident Norman Emery, the cottage belonged to a ‘Platelayer’. Early in the 19th century, railway lines were constructed using ‘plateways’,  L-shaped rails which were designed to carry coal trains. Although early 19th century railway designers develo...

Thanks to Heather, we visited the sites of the camps at Healeyfield, Stanhope and Eastgate. Here are the videos we took. Thanks also to the folk at Dene Howl farm for showing us the right location of the Healeyfield site; I was half a kilometre out! Healeyfield Stanhope    Eastgate

In his excellent paper 'Landscapes of Internment: British Prisoner of War Camps and the Memory of the First World War' *, Professor Tim Grady emphasises that "Britain's memory culture" concentrated on the British troops that fought on the Western Front and forgot the contribution made by German POWs to our industrial heritage through their work on land drainage, river clearance, agriculture, mining, quarrying, railway maintenace etc. Also forgotten are the inevitable interactions between the POWs and their British co-workers and local residents. *Journal of BritishStudies 58 (July2019):543–564.doi:10.1017/jbr.2019.7© The North American Conference on BritishStudies, 2019

While we quite rightly remember those who fought and gave their lives to defend our country during the First World War (my grandfather served as a Royal Naval Reserve and his brother lost his life), we have almost forgotten the 116,000 German troops who were imprisoned in this country. Across the UK, there were 563 POW camps, with research revealing four located in County Durham. A labour shortage due to conscription necessitated German POWs being put to work, and the Durham camps were situated in Weardale, a significant source of raw materials such as lead, iron, coal, lime and gannister. Shipley Moss. Situated just over a mile away from Harperley Camp 93, the well-known WW2 POW camp, a WW1 camp was established at Shipley Moss. Like Harperley and other POW camps, the prisoners originally lived in tents while they built the camp. Of the four Durham camps, Shipley Moss appears to be the only one to have standing archaeological remains. A brick-built circular enclosure with a circumf...