After moving from London and not finding a house to buy straight away, Jacky and I stayed at Hillhead Farm house, Westerhope, the family home of our friends John and Jenny Arthur, on the outskirts of Newcastle upon Tyne, I reckon that all the North of England towns are named after the location or the dire state that people found themselves in the location. County Durham for example as the town of Pitty Me and it certainly as nothing to make you want to stay there. Although the barn that we eventually bought was at Shotley Field near Snods Edge, so its anyones guess over these names.
Whilst at Hillhead and later at Shotley Field, friends from London would stay with us and the attractions for the guests were usually a trip to the Roman Wall, Hadrians encampments on the wall or the ones that are near to the wall, like Chesters, the other big attraction was the reconstruted village at the Beamish Open Air Museum. I cannot do justice to Hadrians Wall or to Beamish with the small space here but it is well worth a few minutes to visit the sites that have both. There are many buildings buildings at Beamish that remind me of the house at East Black Dean, County, Durham where Jacky and I first stayed after London, also farm stable buildings that are very similar to the barn we bought at Shotley and therefore give a good idea of the inside of the barn when we first bought it.
There are also trains and rail stock there, of which the small wagons used for transporting coal make the memories of three small boys hitching a lift on the slow moving convoy of these wagons and dropping off at one of many small lakes, that the coal mines formed where we would build rafts for fishing and moar them in the centre of the lake to stop others using them. The coal mines had a rail system for moving the slack waste from the pit to a distant location where the spoil gradualy built moutains, the sad case of Aberfan in Wales on the 21st October 1966,was the result( much like cities on the falt line) of waste being tipped next to houses and a school. Photos can be seen at http://www.rapo.com/icrgallery/Aberfan.htm and it is something that I think can be best appreciated with the photos of Aberfan that my childhood was also near the pits and the whole area of the West Midlands had relied for many tears on the mines for jobs, folks were born, lived, married and died all within a miles radius, the dialect of the midlands was so varied that I as a child would have difficulty understanding neighbours. English is a broad and varied language and is still changing faster than other languages. For info and photos of Beamish go to http://www.beamish.org.uk and http://www.bpears.org.uk/Beamish/index.html. This site is a good simple one for explaining and showing Hadrian's Wall http://www.aboutscotland.com/hadrian/index.html. There is one other museum at Birmingham which is much like Beamish but with that twist of the Brummy angle on life and that is the Black Country Living Museum which is possibly best seen at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Country_Living_Museum as the Midlands are incapable of creating good designed sites.
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