There's only one Tyne

Since the last episode we and the  river have flowed past Newbrough with its definite Roam road and indefinite Roman fort and go and on through Hexham. Both places described in previous episodes. The Tyne is now a single river. Waters meet was passed at Acomb.  Hexham is worth a pause anyway. Its fine Abbey and medieval buildings – many made with robbed – sorry repurposed – Roman Stone described in series 3. from Corbridge also passed and its Roman Town Coria or Corstopitum -  with its main street made of cobbles from the River Tyne - The remaining Roman stones of its immense granaries and town buildings are a fraction of what was there after those medieval builders robbed the town to construct Hexham! Riding Mill and Stocksfield are behind us as well and we are now near Mickley, Eltringham to be precise.

Transcript

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Episode four There's only one Tyne Since the last episode we and the river have flowed past Newbroth with its definite Roman road and indefinite Roman fort, and go on through Hexham, both places described in previous episodes. The Tyne is now a single river. Waters meet was passed at Acom. Hexham is worth a pause anyway. Its fine abbey and medieval buildings, many made with robbed, sorry, repurposed Roman stone, are described in series three. Cobridge also passes by, with its Roman town Curia or Costopitum, and with its main street made of cobbles from the river Tyne. The remaining Roman stones of its immense granaries and town buildings are a fraction of what was there, especially after those medieval builders robbed the town to construct Hexham. Riding Mill and Stocksfield are behind us as well, and we are now near Mickley, Eltringham to be precise. If there is one rock that people associate with history, it's flint. A very significant piece of flint was found in nineteen ninety four in a field at Eltringham near Prodo, in Northumberland. Flint is a classic rock that Stone Age people shaped into arrowheads, spears and knives, scrapers for skinning animals and woodworking, and used for starting fire. It has been the subject of much research by geologists and archaeologists. Both seek to understand flint sources and properties, but despite a lot of shared understanding, each discipline has different perspectives. Geology focuses on its mineral composition. How was it formed and where was it deposited? Archaeology, on the other hand, concentrates on how and when and by whom flint has been shaped and used. Flint occurs as nodules and sheets mostly in the younger chalk of northern Europe. Chalk is a pure white variety of limestone made from billions of small marine animals, coccoliths that lived seventy to a hundred million years ago in the Cretaceous period. The flint within it originated as silica covered skeletons of other small marine animals that were chemically dissolved in the chalky ooze of the seabed. The silica migrated through and replaced some of the chalk, often filling the burrows of animals. The resulting flint nodules have a variety of shapes, textures and colours. Chalk bedrock occurs mostly in Southeast England, reaching Flamborough Head in Yorkshire. It is also found beneath the North Sea as far north as Aberdeen, and with small detached outcrops occurring in Northern Ireland and on the Isles of Mull and Skye. To geologists flint is one variety of chert. They are both finely crystalline quartz, silicon dioxide, SIO two, but chert is less fine grained. Chert is found in limestones of older geological periods across Britain. It formed in a similar way to flint and is common in northern England. Both rocks are hard and resist erosion, surviving transport by ice sheets, seas and rivers, with pebbles occurring over a much wider area of Britain than their bedrock outcrop. It is human use of these rocks for implements that is the focus of the archaeological interest. Flint has two physical attributes that made it an indispensable part of Stone Age toolkits in Britain for more than 300,000 years. It is hard and it breaks with a sharp concave edge, a concoidal fracture. Prehistoric flint flakes and tools, lithics, are found across the country, and it is often their existence that is the only evidence of human presence. Decades of archaeological research has resulted in a sophisticated classification of the evolution of flint tools, which means that the age and culture of the tool and its user can be inferred. Based on the overall size and shape, the Eltringham find was tentatively identified as a late upper Paleolithic backed blade, that's about eleven thousand years old. Before its discovery, evidence of human occupation this early had only been found a hundred kilometers south in Cumbria and Yorkshire. There is still uncertainty as tools with the same shape as Paleolithic ones could have continued to be used in the north after that era. Nonetheless, the blade is still regarded as the earliest sign of humans in Northumberland. We haven't travelled down the river very far. Squeezed between the Tyne and the Newcastle Carlisle Rail line at Prada, is a wooded mound, a ridge really, almost one point five kilometres long, a hundred meters wide and twenty meters high. Where the vegetation and soil have been worn away, it's white. The ridge, known locally as the Spechels, the previous name of the riverside, it's man made. It is made of millions of tons of waste material from a factory in Predor which produced ammonium sulfate for explosives and fertilizer during World War II. It was turf to disguise the ridge in the factory from German bombers, the trees came later. The ridge is made of calcium carbonate, the same composition as limestone and chalk, and so this is the only piece of chalk downland in the county. The Spetules is a special habitat here in Northumberland. It hasn't exactly got a southern chalk grassland flora, but rather a mix of lime loving plants. They include muskmallow, musk thistle, kinnevetch, wild marjoram, and traveller's joy. We have reached Newcastle, and granted we've moved a little bit off the river, but bear with me, these two stories are worth telling, even if one is a repeat from an earlier series. In the middle of Newcastle upon Tyne is a huge area of pasture land, much larger than Central Park in New York. What gets the Town Moor and its neighbours, Nuns Moor and Hunter's Moor into this rock book and podcast? They are one of the very few places where you can see evidence of the mining of coal in a city whose name is synonymous the world over with coal. The coal seam mined directly underneath the moor is carboniferous and around three hundred and twelve million years old. It is called the high main seam, and it's a very thick coal, sometimes exceeding two meters. That thickness and the fact that it was so close to the surface made it an attractive proposition to men wishing to mine coal. The mine here may have started as early as the fourteenth century. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries mining was extensive by bell pits and then pillar and stall methods. The very uneven surface of Nunn's Moor west of Grandstand Road is caused by old coal workings and their collapse, subsidence. As recently as the Second World War, because of the urgent need for fuel and power, over three hundred and forty thousand square meters of coal was mined by open cast methods in the northern parts of the moors. The moor is mainly agricultural grassland supporting cattle, within mooing distance of St. James's Park, and there is also some woodland. Open country birds here include skylark, and in the winter waders such as golden plover. In the woodland are willow warblers, chifchaffs and black caps. The stones used in the buildings of every town give us a chance to see an amazing variety of rocks. We don't have to travel very far. The city of Newcastle upon Tyne is no exception. The stones vary from sedimentary to metamorphic to igneous, and from the very old to the geologically young. The sources of stone are equally diverse, from quarries as near as Kenton to as far away as Norway. The building stones of the civic centre have a huge range, from the four hundred and sixty million year old metamorphic rocks, schists from Otter in Norway, behind the river god Tyne, to the hundred and fifty million year old white fossiliferous Jurassic limestones from Portland, on the south coast, which face the tower. Granite features often in Newcastle. The plinth of the fantastic nineteen fourteen war memorial, the response at Barras Bridge, is granite from Sharp in Cumbria, as are the entrances to Metro stations. But the most famous streets and buildings in Newcastle, the most architecturally outstanding, Grey Street and the rest of Granger Town, are all constructed of local Carboniferous sandstones, from places like Denwick and Hedden and Springwell, Forestones and Kenton. Stone has long been the preferred choice of building in the north of Britain. Where there are many local sources of suitable rocks. One thousand nine hundred years ago Hadrian built his wall of local sandstone. The nineteenth century architects and developers, like Dobson and Granger, chose local sandstone too for their neoclassical rebuilding of the city centre. We're still beside the time, but we've gone south of it. We're in Fellin. There have been many heartbreaking tragedies caused by explosions in coal mines in Durham. On the twenty fifth of may eighteen twelve at Fellin Colliery ninety two lives were lost. It was a turning point in mine safety across Britain and the world. The pit at Fellin had opened in seventeen seventy nine. It had two shafts, John and William, which had been newly deepened to one hundred and seventy two meters below the surface, to work a ninety centimetre thick coal called the Low Main. Like most colliers at this time, coal was mined by driving a series of corridors and passages on a grid system. It's called Pillar and Stall, and the pillars are left there to support the roof. To prevent dangerous gases building up, the workings were ventilated by burning a fire at the bottom one shaft, the upcast, and drawing air down the downcast shaft via a one way system through the mine using a series of doors. Coal and the black coalish shales that occur with it naturally contain several gases that result from the decomposition of their original organic material. Miners knew the gases well and had their own terms for each. There was fire damp, methane, explosive, white damp, carbon dioxide, toxic, black damp or choke damp, carbon monoxide, explosive and toxic, stink damp, hydrogen sulfide, explosive and toxin, and after damp, a mixture of dangerous gases left after an explosion. At eleven thirty on the twenty fifth of may eighteen twelve, an explosion occurred in the mine that was so powerful that it blew the winding gear from the top of both shafts. The cause was believed to be fire damp. Thick coal dust settled over almost three kilometers downwind. Ninety two men and boys perished in the explosion. The youngest was eight. His name was Thomas Gordon, a trapper. He was paid nine old pennies a day about four P to day for a twelve hour shift to open and close the doors that controlled the circulating air. Thomas's name and those of ninety others are inscribed on a modest memorial in St. Mary's churchyard nearby. It was the local vicar, the Reverend John Hodson, who raised public awareness of the loss of lives in mines and the need to improve mine safety. His campaigning resulted in meetings of doctors, clergy, mine owners and engineers. One member of that group was William Reed Clanny, a Sunderland doctor who had devised the first, but impractical, safety lamp. Another was George Stevenson, who invented the Geordy lamp, a rival to the Davy lamp that was ultimately used in mines across the world. Have you ever wondered why there are a lot of pebbles of flint and sometimes lumps of chalk on the foreshore at the mouth of the Tyne and on adjacent beaches? Flint and chalk are common in the southeast of England, but as bedrock onshore only extend as far north as Flamborough Head. So why are these rocks here? The chief reason is the coal trade. For centuries, ships carrying coal from the northeast of England to London would return to the Tyne full of sand and flint and chalk gravel dredged from the river Thames and its mouth. The material was needed as ballast to ensure the ships stayed stable at sea. Once they arrived back in the northeast, they dumped their load in the river to take on coal, but that started to obstruct ships, so ballast docks and stays sprang up to offload the sand and gravel ashore. The coal trade was exceedingly profitable, and then the ballast business became the centre of political and legal battles. On one side was the protectionism of the Burgesses of Newcastle, on the other the financial ambitions of those excluded from that monopoly, including the bishops of Durham. The ballast piles got bigger and spread along the foreshore. So they built wagonways and then railways to create piles further from the river and along the coast. South Shields came to be dominated by huge hills of flint, gravel and sand that spread across the east of the town. But it wasn't only ballast that was dumped in South Shields. Cheap and plentiful coal and nearby seawater meant there had been a flourishing salt making trade along the riverside ever since the 15th century. Later that would spawn chemical industries. Bottle and glass manufacturing sprang up in the seventeenth century too. All these trades generated waste, and that waste ended up as huge piles within the town. Throughout the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries most of the ballast and waste hills were progressively cleared, some by relief labour in times of economic depression. Sites were restored to green spaces, like the marine parks, and today it's really hard to appreciate what was once there. And with the mouth of the Tyne and the North Sea in sight, we will about turn and head west, well more south and west, to the source of the river Eden, in Moorland, virtually on the Cumbria North Yorkshire border. We might start in Carboniferous Rocks, but very soon we will be in the familiar reds of Permian and Triassic country.