Country Diary: Durham

One of my most poignant memories is of the day when my mother took us back for one last look at the place where she grew up. Portsmouth was finally about to undergo major post-war redevelopment, sweeping away Victorian back streets and the corner shop that had once been her childhood home. On the way there she regaled my brother and me with tales of street games with her friends and the colorful local characters that came into the shop. When we finally arrived we were too late; the bulldozers had done their work, leaving a wasteland of broken brick. Only pavements and long rows of foot-worn front doorsteps marked the place where the street and its corner shop had been. This memory returned today, as we stood in what had once been Houghall Colliery village, about a mile outside Durham city, where front doorsteps among tangled brambles are the last vestiges of its existence. During its short life the colliery produced 3m tons of coal before the seams were worked out in 1884, but a dwindling community of what had been 153 houses, a church and a school lasted until 1955, when the last house was demolished and the site was planted with trees.

We sat on one of the doorsteps, as residents must have done on similar sunny mornings, and tried to imagine the scene a century ago, when there would have been children playing in the street, washing hanging out to dry and neighbors chatting over the backyard wall. We watched a grey squirrel rummaging among the carpet of leaves that covered the barely discernible track of what was once Garden Street. Blackbirds were stripping the last of the berries from the hollies in what is now a well-developed wood, wrens foraged among fallen tree trunks, gold crests flitted through the pines and a pair of nuthatches chased in noisy courtship high in the branches of a beech tree. Beyond the doorsteps, jays screeched as we walked deeper into the wood, where we found the capped shaft that led to coal seams 150ft underground, surrounded by scattered, moss-covered bricks in the undergrowth, stamped with the word "LOVE", the colliery owner's name. I tipped over a brick with the toe of my boot and a fleeting grey shadow dashed out and disappeared into a tunnel in the grass - a field mouse, one of the village's new generation of residents. The relentless ability of nature to obliterate traces of human endeavor and reclaim lost territory can be both humbling and reassuring.