Pelton Fell Pit

A Memory of Chester-Le-Street.

I remember moving to Pelton Fell at about the age of eight, number 9 Ferndene Avenue. The house was new and we were the first to occupy it. There was a small alley at the end of the street that led to the railway line. A small shunting engine ran back and forth along the line from Pelton fell pit to Waldridge. There used to be an engine shed up on the fells near to Waldridge not far from the Swan Inn and Waldridge drift. From my house at night I could hear the compressor throbbing away pushing life giving air down the drift for the miners.
Our garden backed onto Scotties farm, as we called it, and we even had the odd cow climb from the field to graze in our back garden. Down on the main road there used to be a little hut on the road where a watchman sat guarding the level crossing and across the road from that there was an old mans seat next to a small sidings where coal trucks were stabled.
This little watchman’s hut was on a path that we used to call the battery. This name came, one presumes, from the fact that this path led along the train line to the pit baths and then to the battery house where the miners got their lamps from. This battery house was facing the reason for it all, Pelton Fell pit head and winding gear. If you continued along that path it took you to the Top House, Middle House and the Club, the three pubs that served the area. Just a short way up from the Top house there was an inclined plane where full coal trucks used to pull the empties back up the hill to be filled. This was a sight to see, and the noise of the steel rope as it ran over the steel wheels embedded in the ground was exciting to a young boy.
Just down the road there was the Scouts Hut, I joined the scouts and my mate Malcolm Scott and I got hold of two battered old bugles and we used to go on top of the pit heap that used to dominate the landscape there and play them. We even swam in, what seemed at the time, a huge pond that was just yards away from the scouts hut. Our mothers told us it was dangerous, and yes I suppose it was, with all that weed and stuff. But we were young and at the time impervious to any harm, or so we thought.
About 500yards from that inclined plane there was a large hall, this is where the Pelton Fell miner’s band used to practice. Looking back it is heart breaking to know that all those bands and miners have faded into memory and are now as ghosts only to those who can recall them. I remember Durham Big Meeting when it was in its prime; I remember all those bands marching in ahead of the banners. The odd one draped in black to denote a death of a miner at his work, yes my father was a miner and so too his three brothers as well as my grandfather. I remember walking in to the course following the Chester Moor banner many a time, and I was proud to be there, proud to be part of that mining community. To feel the thud of that big drum in my chest and to know that I was a small part of that huge mining family.

Disappointing update - Reality rears its ugly head through the rose tinted glasses of childhood!

I remember the happy days of my childhood! I remember in 1954 or there abouts when I was eight years old we moved from 33 Conyers Road South Pelaw to 9 Ferndene Avenue, Pelton Fell. My house faced farmers fields and the fells beyond. As I have said there was a train line then at the end of my street down some steps that led to a path next to the track. There were times when a small tank engine ran from its shed up on the fells to Pelton fell pit where it was needed for moving coal wagons and the like. Why the engine shed was in the middle of the fells I suppose is only known to those who built it there. I didn’t know at the time but the little engines years of service were numbered, as with all things. A few years later when I had grown some that engine had gone and you could walk through the desolate and abandoned shed. I remember seeing it half demolished and looking like broken stone teeth rising out of the green fells.

In those days I thought that life was unchanging, but of course life moves on. If it didn’t the new house that we had just moved to would never have been built. Nor would the council houses on the other side of the fells, or the Garden Farm estate that exists now. I was really put out and annoyed to return to Chester le Street to find they had demolished my old junior school and built houses on it, and I was very indignant to find that they had also built houses on the farm land that I had passed many many times in my youth and childhood. But time moves on and things are ever changing, Such is the naivety of childhood, innocence and the bitter memory that is nostalgia.

Things have changed now and I think not for the better, as children I remember that we used to walk the fells and never ever thought of perverted strangers unlike today. At that time it was not at all unusual for children to be seen walking and playing alone on the fells. I remember at about the age of twelve taking my sister and a very pretty young girl (D H) for a walk up the fells, hand in hand up to what we knew as the forty trees. Life has become very tainted for children these days, I feel very sorry for their lost childhood. I also remember when I was older walking the fells with another very pretty young lady (R N) crossing a small bridge across the burn going to visit my granddad. I think about her on many an occasion and wonder if she had a happy life, because she deserved it. But I digress and that very pretty walk has become an insult to the eye, or it was the last time I was there.

When I return to the fells they seem from a distance to hold the same beauty as I remembered as a child. Unfortunately I will never walk through that valley and woods again; because the last time I did it had been despoiled and used as a dumping ground for rubbish. It is true that you can’t stand in the same stream twice, time moves on and if you return to your childhood and your past you will be sorely disappointed. When I was a child I used to look on the fells as my back yard, as my safe playground, which it was in those days. At least I never heard of anything nasty taking place there. Now it seems that fly tippers and others have moved into my back yard and deliberately caused criminal damage to what was once a beautiful place, even if the waters of the burn were something of an orange colour. It seem that today we cannot look after the beauty and the wonder of nature that others have left behind.

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