KNOW YOUR PARISH

LAMESLEY

Geoff Nicholson

St Andrew's Church, Lamesley, stands almost isolated at the southern end of the Team Valley, a little south- west of Gateshead. It is just visible from the Gateshead western by-pass stretch of the Al by travellers heading north but any south-bound motorist who cranes his or her head for a look across the dual carriageway and the freight depot will be risking a serious accident.

A chapel stood here in mediaeval times, and when the church at Chester-le-Street became collegiate in 1286, Lamesley was attached to its second Prebend. It remained a chapelry of Chester-le-Street for several centuries after the reformation before becoming a parish in its own right. The oldest parts of the present church, however, dates only from 1759.

Records of the Parish are deposited at Durham County Record Office, County Hall, Durham, where they have been microfilmed. A copy of the microfilm is also available in Tyne and Wear Archives Department, West Blandford Street, Newcastle. The Bishops' Transcripts from 1765 to 1851 are in Durham University Archives and special collections and can now be found on-line*. Unfortunately, Lamesley is still not included on the I.G.I. (1988 edition), nor have its monumental inscriptions yet been recorded. It is one of the few parishes in what was northern County Durham not to have had its registers transcribed earlier this century by  Herbert Maxwell Wood, and as a result its marriages are not included in Boyd's Marriage Index. It did not escape the attentions of the late Bill Rounce, however, and his series of parochial marriage indexes do include a volume for Lamesley. As Lamesley is now a part of Gateshead Metropolitan Borough, the Borough Library has included it in its card-index to the 1851 Census of Gateshead.

One possible reason why most transcribers have been "put off" from tackling Lamesley registers could be the atrocious way in which they were kept for part of the 18th century. Entries are out of place, in no chronological order, frequently written sideways of upside down and, even when found, in such terrible handwriting as to be all but illegible. There is interesting research yet to be done on the parish clerks of Lamesley - which one was the drunk who made a habit of opening the book at random and scribbling the entries anywhere? Things did improve later, however, and it should be noticed that the very full entries of baptisms, introduced by Bishop Shute Barrington in 1798, continue at Lamesley until 14 June 1818, duplicating the conventional register introduced after Rose's Act in 1813 and thereby providing much otherwise unobtainable evidence about the parents' origins for over five years longer than in other places.

Lamesley parish included four townships, Lamesley itself, Hedley, Kibblesworth and Ravensworth.The name "Lamesley" could possible mean "Leam's-ley", ie "the clearing alongside the Roman road". As the Roman road from Chester-le-Street to Newcastle only really skirts Lamesley, the road in question is more likely to have been the often-suggested but never proven westward extension of the Wrekendike from the modern Wrekenton towards either Lanchester or Ebchester, which would have to pass right through Lamesley. Apart from a large modern railway freight depot Lamesley township now consists of little more than the church and a handful of houses, although not far away is the Ravensworth Arms, a public house which was originally Clubdon Hall, belonging to the Clavering family. In the 1950's the church acquired certain notoriety as the only one in the country being served by a centenarian vicar.

Hedley is, as it always was, still a totally rural area, on a windy hill-top with fine views over the Tyne and Derwent Valleys.

The village of Kibblesworth began as an agricultural settlement (the local pub is still the "Plough Inn") but  changed its character completely following the sinking of the Robert Pit by John Bowes & Partners in the 19th century. This pit was on the Bowes Railway, which brought coal from the company's many other pits in North-west Durham down to Jarrow, where what was not needed by the shipyards and iron works of Bowes' partner, Charles Mark Palmer, could be shipped off to London. Once it became a colliery village, Kibblesworth soon acquired two Methodist Chapels. The Primitives were there by 1822 and the Wesleyans, part of the Gateshead Circuit, by 1829, although their ultimate buildings at Kibblesworth were built in 1869 and 1868, respectively. In recent years the site of the pit, closed on the 1970's has been worked as an opencast site, and now that that has been restored, there is very little left to indicate its mining past. Kibblesworth is now entering into its third phase of existence as a commuter village for Tyneside and the Team Valley.

Ravensworth, on the west side of the   Team Valley, has largely kept its rural atmosphere - apart, that is from the half of the Team Valley Trading Estate which intrudes into it and is now fringed by the Al road. This is mainly through its being the site of Ravensworth  Castle.   Having   been owned by the family of Bishop Flambard of Durham and then by the Lumleys, Boyntons and Gascoignes (no relation to the footballer)

Ravensworth was bought in 1607 by Thomas Liddell.  Thomas son another Thomas was created a Baronet in 1642 for his defence of Newcastle against the Scots. His descendants   grew extremely rich through their ownership of large parts of the coal industry on Tyneside in the 18^th  century and in 1821 Sir Henry Liddell, the 7th Baronet, became a Peer, with the title of Lord Ravensworth. the mediaeval castle was demolished, apart from two towers, in 1808 and a mansion built from plans by John Nash.

Unfortunately this fell victim to the very source of Liddells' coal wealth and mining subsidence made it necessary to   demolish the building in the 1930's. The Liddell family have, ever since, been more associated with their own estate   at Eslington, Northumberland (see "Know Your Parish XXII - Whittingham, by Ken Brown, JNDFHS Vol. 13, No. 1). Old Ravensworth is a few cottages around a cross-road on the hillside to the west of Lamesley, and is probably the original Ravensworth village, the castle having first been called "Ravenshelm".

Other places which were in Lamesley parish in the nineteenth century were Betty Pit, Shop Pit, Bewick Main,Team Colliery, Low Eighton, Chowdene and Allerdene, all small pit villages in or near the Team Valley. The registers also contain many entries for families living just outside the boundaries of the parish, at Birtley and at Eighton Banks. In the latter district, sometimes spelled "Ayton Banks", the major industry was quarrying the very hard sandstone which, apart from providing the facings of most major buildings in Newcastle, also supplied grindstones for much of the world. If that last statement seems rather extreme, just consider the old conundrum of two or three hundred years ago "What three things can be found all over the world? a Scot, a rat and a Newcastle grindstone!

The Team Valley itself is a remarkable feature. It contains the River Team, which is quite small, nothing more than the lower reaches of the Beamish Burn, which itself has its origins near Stanley as the tiny Houghall Burn.  "Team" as a river names is, of course, from the origins of "Tame" and "Thames" but the Team is not to be compared to either of those. It obviously was never capable of creating the huge valley which occupies and which is, in fact, the pre-ice age course of the River Wear. When the ice melted the Wear was blocked in its path near Chester-   le-Street by glacial deposits and instead of being able to flow north to the Tyne as before, it had to carve out the now-wooded gorge past Washington and the Hyltons, to reach the sea at Sunderland. This left its old valley empty, except for the local drainage which became the River Team. The valley itself in its present form is also glacial, being U-shaped with a flat, silted-up bottom.  Coal seams which outcrop on the west side of the valley are matched exactly by those in the east.

An historical account of Lamesley can be found in Volume 2 of Surtees' History of County Durham and a   detailed treatment of Ravensworth and the Liddells is in   "Romantic Ravensworth", by Clarence R. Walton, a small paperback published in 1950. For a brief history of this, and all other County Durham parishes, together with a   description of them as they were at the end of the 19th century, one could do a lot worse than to refer to the second  (1894) edition of Whellan's Directory of County Durham, available in local reference libraries. This weighty tome is my personal standby for all sorts of purposes and one which I can thoroughly recommend to all members.

Editors notes

On-line resources

The following parish records can be found on-line at Genuki

Indexes to Baptisms 1730-1797:-Surnames beginning A-P, and Marriage indexes for 1689-1837 from the George Bell Collection

Monumental Inscriptions for Lamesley are held by the Northumberland & Durham Family History Society

“History, Topography, and Directory of the County Palatine of Durham”by Whellan, & William, has a chapter on the Parish of Lamesley page 876

The book can be found on-line at Google books.