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You may find this information helpful when researching the area prior to your visit

Old Spa Village

Gainford is arguably the most attractive village in County Durham and has long been a popular place of retirement for residents of nearby Darlington. The origins of its name are disputed, though there is a legend that there was once a ford on the river and that the ownership of this ford was disputed by the residents on either side of the Tees. In the end a battle was fought in which the residents of the Durham side of the river gained the ford- hence Gainford. On the Yorkshire side of the river we find the site of the deserted village of Barforth or Barford. Its name is said to be a reminder of an attempt by its residents to barricade the ford during the battle with Gainford .

In the nineteenth century Gainford village had its own spa. Today its main features are an unspoilt village green, a Jacobean hall and an attractive Georgian street called High Row. The village church of St Mary's, Gainford is also of interest, it is on the site of an Anglo-Saxon monastery built by Bishop Ecgred of Lindisfarne in the early 9th century and is said to be the resting place of a Northumbrian chieftain called Ida or Eda. In more recent times the church became famed in local folklore as the place where a vicar married a Pigg, christened a Lamb and buried a Hogg all in the same week !

Piercebridge - The First Grandfather Clock

"My Grandfather's Clock was too tall for the shelf
So it stood ninety years on the floor."

Piercebridge, on the north bank of the River Tees, two miles downstream from Gainford is in County Durham but its Hotel `The George' is across the river in Yorkshire. The hotel is famed as the home of the clock which inspired a visiting American composer called Henry Clay Work to write his famous song `My Grandfather's Clock ' (1878), from which all long case clocks now take their name.

The clock is notable in that it stopped at the very moment of its owner's death and never worked again.

"It wrang an alarm in the dead of the night, an alarm that for years had been dumb And we knew that his spirit was pluming for flight, that his hour of departure had come. Still the clock kept the time with a soft and muffled chime as we silently stood by its side. But it Stopped, Short,never to go again When the old man died."

Piercebridge; Romans & Brigantes

Piercebridge is situated at the point where the old Roman road called Dere Street crossed the River Tees. This road ran north from the Roman military headquarters at York well up into Tweeddale. The village green at Piercebridge marks the site of a Roman fort called MAGAE which stood on the road guarding the crossing of the Tees.This fort at Piercebridge will have been of strategic importance as the fierce Ancient British tribe called theBrigantes, were closely associated with this area.