A1-The Great North Road
"In Durham the dales continue beautiful, but, in addition, the spreading hill-top moors, less troubled by the constraining stone wall, are there more attractive in themselves; indeed they afford some most exhilarating runs. Eastern Durham has been too much scarred by mining to be inviting touring ground, and although the cliff-bound coast is a good one there are hardly any facilities for approaching it by car." AA Road Book c.1920
John Cary's 1806 map of County Durham is oriented with West at the top. The Great North Road is highlighted in green.
The southern boundary of Durham follows the River Tees with the Great North Road crossing it at Croft-on-Tees. The low ground to the east of Darlington lies on Triassic rocks of the Bunter but the Great North Road keeps to the older Magnesian Limestone which outcrops further to the west and north. These Permian strata lie unconformably on the Coal Measures which we first meet about Ferryhill and which take us to the north of the county at Gateshead and the River Tyne.
The geology of Durham and Northumberland is well displayed at the Hancock Museum in Newcastle, which houses Albany Hancock's collection of Coal Measure fossils..
John Aston, continuing his 1639 journey from York to Berwick, enters Durham not at Croft, with its medieval bridge, but a couple of miles downstream at Neasham, where today there is no through road.
"Apr 28 The next day beeing Sonday, I passed over the river Teeze at a foord which divides York-shire from the Bishoprick at a little villadge called Neesom. Then I came to Darlington, 10 miles from North Allerton, where I baited and found the price of drinke encrease upon mee, 8d. for a flaggon. his si a pritty market towne seated upon a hill over the river Skerne; hence I went to a small villadge 3 3miles further, called Cottam, where I lodged all night in a meane house.
"Apr 29 The next day beeing Monday, I came to Durham (11 miles), the bishop's sea of that diocesse, where he hath a goodly auncient castle for his habitation which now is taken up for the king, who came that night to towne. The towne is pleasantly seated and environed with the river Weere, especially that part where the castle, cathedral and prebends' houses stand, which resemble a horse shooe, beeing seperated from the rest of the towne (as it were) with the river, save only one space to goe to those buildings like the distance betweene the two ends of the horse shooe."
Oliver, in his 1835 tourist guide to Northumberland and the Border, invites his readers journeying along the Great North Road to take a more interesting deviation as they enter Durham:
“As there is little deserving the tourist’s attention on the direct road between Catterick and Bishop Auckland, the route may be agreeably diversified by proceeding from Catterick bridge by way of Easby Abbey to Richmond, where the old castle and the ruins of the abbey are well deserving of the antiquary's notice; and the extensive prospect, either from the moor or from a rising ground on the road to Gilling, extending from the cathedral of York on the south to that of Durham on the north, with the Hambleton and Cleveland hills on the east, is one of the most extensive in the North of England, and of itself sufficient to indemnify the traveler who diverges five miles from his direct road for the sake of visiting Richmond. From Richmond let the tourist proceed to Greta bridge; and thence, - after viewing Mortham tower, the junction of the Greta with the Tees, and the delightful scenery about Rokeby Park, so finely sketched by Sir Walter Scott in Rokeby, - by way of the Abbey bridge to Barnard Castle, the ancient seat of the Baliols. From Barnard Castle, the road to Bishop Auckland passes through Staindrop, a little to the north of which lies Raby Castle, the seat of the Duke of Cleveland, one of the finest old baronial mansions remaining in the kingdom.”
Hodgkin, in his Little Guide to Durham of 1913 wrote of roads:
"Considered as a whole, Durham roads are well engineered and well maintained, most of them being surfaced with whinstone, either alone or mixed with varying proportions of blast furnace slag. Portions of the trunk roads, e.g. from Birtley to Gateshead, are never really first-class on account of the exceptionally heavy traffic. There are few serious gradients on roads likely to be used by the visiting motorist or cyclist, but care must be exercised on the Great North Road, going N., at Ferryhill and Croxdale (gradients 1 in 7 and 1 in 8)." Inglis puts these gradients at no more than 1 in 13.
It was in County Durham that the first of the northern part of the A1(M) was built. The first part was from Junction 56, two miles north of Scotch Corner, where the Great North Road turned north eastward leaving the Roman road to head north to Piercebridge. The A1(M) went between these two older routes, bypasssing Darlington and rejoining the old road (now the A167) near Brafferton, south of Newton Aycliffe. Part of the Darlington bypass used the alignment of a disused mineral line from the quarries near Barton. In 1967 the A1(M) was extended, first to Bradbury, leaving Newton Aycliffe to the west and then on northwards.
Writing in 1934 about his journey around England, J.B.Priestley offers this view of the road through Durham: "We reached the Great North Road. Along its deserted length, the raindrops were bouncing merrily. There was no more colour in the day itself than there is in a bundle of steel rods, but up to Darlington the red ruins of autumn were still about us. At the great divide of the North Road, Scotch Corner, which ought to be the most romantic spot in the country but somehow is not, we turned right for Darlington; and while the rain still spouted into the main street there, I sat upstairs in a cafe and ate roast mutton and treacle pudding behind the Yorkshire Post folded against the water jug. The waitress who attended me was tall, frail and looked tubercular. (Probably my own temperature was beginning to rise then. Still, it is surprising how many waitresses in these cafes are tall, frail and look tubercular.) We ran through County Durham, which offered us nothing but distant glimpses of coal-pits and mining villages. There was a nightmare place that seemed to have been constructed out of small army huts and unwanted dog kennels, all sprawling in the muck outside some gigantic works. What they made inside those works I did not discover, but even a Kaffir would not have envied the employees if it was they who lived in those forlorn shanties. A dingy huddle of cottage houses, bethels in corrugated iron, picture palaces with hardly a flake of paint left on them, butchers' windows decorated with offal, all announced that we were arriving at some great industrial centre, that soon we should be in civilisation again. First, a mile or two of Gateshead, then a great bridge across steaming space, and we were in Newcastle."
Lincolnshire
©Biff Vernon 2001, 2002