Taking a Walk
The beach beyond Easington Colliery was once a hellish spectacle. The journalist Robert Chesshyre observed dozens of men, backs bent, collecting fragments of coal from the sea. Soaked scavengers dried their clothes by a makeshift fire. ‘Further out, the fierce wind whipped up venomous, coal-stained waves,’ wrote Chesshyre. ‘The beach was as black as a coal tip, which is literally what it was.’
Chesshyre wrote those words not in Victorian times, nor during the Great Depression, but in 1986 when the mines that followed seams far under the North Sea were still dumping toxic mine tailings – 40 million tons in total – on Durham’s coastline. Two years later, the National Trust took the apparently quixotic decision to buy a mile of this ruined seashore from British Coal for £1.
Like many southern trippers, I don’t think I even realised Durham had a coast but its 12 miles are some of the quietest and most striking stretches of eastern shoreline.
I parked at Nose’s Point, overlooking a magnificently desolate coastal sweep. Two decades ago, Blast Beach was a scene of industrial ruination. Now, on a dull day, the beach glowed with subtle shades of yellow, brown and grey.
The coast path headed south along the clifftops. For centuries, Durham’s monks had excavated coal from bell-shaped pits but large-scale mining didn’t reach here until the turn of the 20th century. The Easington Coal Company opened its first shaft in 1899 and a coal-rush began. By 1930, Horden’s 4,000 miners excavated 6,758 tons of coal in a single day, a European record that stood for 30 years. It was said in the 1930s that Durham miners drank champagne and bought two pianos each. In reality, working conditions were grim. More than 80 men died in an underground explosion at Easington in 1951.
The last mine closed in 1993 and the area is not thriving. Old mining terraces have an auction guide price of £10,000. A four-bed semi is yours for £65,000. The jobs and camaraderie coal provided are still missed here; a pristine coastline is not much consolation. The old mining villages, built for the business of coal, must be the only seaside communities to turn their backs on their fine coast.
The National Trust’s first warden here was more rubbish-collector than wildlife ranger, fending off fly-tippers who added detritus to the beach, but the Trust now owns five miles, its £1 purchase more than vindicated. The North Sea sparkles blue on a bright day and Durham’s coast is naturally blessed by unique, Magnesian limestone grasslands. In summer, these bloom with yellow wort, fairy flax and rock rose, the food-plant for the northern brown argus butterfly.
Interrupting the gently undulating coast are narrow ‘denes’ – steep-sided, atmospheric, tree-filled valleys. In Hawthorn Dene, I admired an overgrown garden of ancient fruit trees belonging to a ruined, Gothic mansion which had been demolished in 1979, followed by a spectacular, brick railway viaduct.
Outside Horden, I followed the path down crumbly limestone cliffs to the beach. In the 1990s, the weird, sulphurous yellow of Durham’s beaches – stained with iron oxide and washed by the sea – made them a useful stand-in for Mars in Alien 3. It was predicted to take 50 years for the mine tailings to disappear but the waves (plus Heritage Lottery funds) have worked swiftly.
There’s only an echo of industrial waste in a strange crust on the beach. This contains a strata of colours from purple to ochre that might include coal, iron and brick, the alluvial deposits of industrial Britain.
Like the whole Durham coast, it is strange, soulful and unexpectedly beautiful.
Durham Heritage Coast http://www. durhamheritagecoast.org/ has useful maps of the 20-mile coastal path from Sunderland to Hartlepool Headland. A good day’s walk is 11 miles one-way, from Seaham to the sand dunes of Crimdon