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

The club’s nickname “the Quakers” comes from the proximity to the nearby railway line (which made them the first in history with their own station when the first passenger railway operated in 1825). The passing trains quite often rumble past making the whole ground shake !! In 1960, they hosted Millwall in their first game under floodlights and later that night the West Stand burnt down. Someone had forgotten to extinguish the gas lamps high on the floodlight pylons !! Extensive modernisation has taken place recently under the guiding hand of “colourful” chairman George Reynolds, who was formerly a safecracker in a previous life.

Famous Players: - Ron Greener, Marco Gabbiadini, Russell Pinker, David Brown, Alan Walsh.

Famous Fans: - Vic Reeves (comedian).

From Rokeby near Barnard Castle, the River Tees passes through Whorlton, Wycliffe and Ovington to Winston on Tees, where a road leads two miles north to Raby Castle and the adjacent village of Staindrop. Cnut (or Canute) the Dane (c 994 - 1035), Viking King of England, Denmark and Norway, the self appointed `Emperor of the North' owned a mansion and estate in the vicinity of Staindrop in the tenth century.

It has been suggested that the mansion owned by Cnut was on the site of the nearby Raby Castle and some argue that it was from here that he ruled his kingdom and Empire. Raby Castle's historic `Bulmer Tower' is believed to incorporate Cnut's mansion. Cnut `the Great' was the son of Sweyn Forkbeard of Denmark and was very much a Viking in the war-like way he took control of England, despite the fact that he had been baptised and claimed to be a practising Christian.

The name of Raby is Viking-Danish in origin and means `settlement on the boundary mark' - perhaps a boundary between Angle, Danish and Norse settled districts ?. Raby lies on the course of an old Roman road that leads to Stainmore and Rey Cross - another boundary marker.Staindrop, which is historically the estate village for Raby also has a Danish name deriving from`Steinndrup' meaning `stony valley' - or perhaps `the valley of Stein', a common Viking personal name.

Place names containing the Viking element Stain are very common along the Tees valley but virtually absent further to the north.Raby Castle and the lands around Staindrop village were returned to the Northumbrian Bishops by King Cnut in the eleventh century as a gesture of goodwill to the Angles of the north. These lands like many others along the Tees valley had been taken from the Northumbrians by Cnut's Viking ancestors. Cnut may have wished to maintain good relations with Northumbria north of the Tees, because of its useful role as a `border region' which could defend his kingdom from the threat of the raiding Scots.

Raby, one of the best medieval castles in northern England, in early times associated with Cnut, passed later into the hands of the influential Norman family called the Nevilles who were the most important barons in the Bishopric of Durham from the twelfth century onwards.