In 1963, one year before this line closed to passenger traffic under Richard Beeching’s cuts to the rural railway network, the enthusiast Alan Snowdon made a home movie of the train journey from Darlington into the heart of this dale, to Middleton-in-Teesdale. It’s a delightful record of a country branch line, sadly used by too few passengers to make it financially viable, but now the Tees Valley railway walk – an easy rambler’s route into the countryside – is probably followed by more people than travelled along it during the line’s final years.
In Snowdon’s movie there is a glimpse of the view that we are enjoying now, from the viaduct high over the River Balder. A gusting southerly wind is sending cloud shadows racing across the landscape, torturing tree canopies in the wooded gorge far below, threatening to blow our hats over the parapet.
We head for the shelter of a deep cutting, tranquil enough to hear the rasp of stridulating grasshoppers, the still air saturated with fragrance of the last meadowsweet blossom. There are more butterflies here than we’ve seen in one spot all summer. Speckled woods contesting territories in dappled shade among the hawthorn scrub; red admirals, peacocks, commas and green-veined whites nectaring on knapweed, brambles and corn sow-thistles; meadow browns and small skippers on ragwort in the sun-drenched grassy embankment.
I must confess to pangs of nostalgic regret, that I never stood here listening for the rhythmic puffing of an approaching tank engine, heard the click-clack of carriages trundling by, caught the lingering whiff of soot after the train passed. I would always have been the kid on the footbridge, enveloped in smoke while the engine chugged underneath. But that reverie evaporates like smoke, with the knowledge that the decline in butterfly abundance owes much to climate breakdown and a legacy of the age of coal, and that those comma, speckled wood and small skipper butterflies are here in Durham because they are expanding their ranges northwards as climate zones shift.
So, a consoling thought: maybe walkers’ access to this mosaic of flowery habitats, sympathetically managed since the track was lifted 60 years ago, was Beeching’s unwitting gift to the future.
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