shewhomust | Coxhoe Cassop Kelloe

Today's walk was a

durham_rambler special, checking out some footpath queries: a hard-to-identify path which will present problems when the crops have grown, an application to remove a footpath for quarrying... On the map, the route he devised around these looked like a tour of Durham villages (whose names I love), but on the ground it was greener (if not exactly rural) and more interesting than expected.

It's not spring yet: a grey day, and no wild flowers to be seen, unless you count the odd drift of snowdrops that have escaped outside the farm gates. In one hedgerow the pussy willow was in a delicate state of transition, silvery fur just bursting into golden brushes, individual flowers a mixture of the two, furry bees dusted with pollen, and too stirred by the wind to sit still and be photographed. The path climbs high about the old quarry; on a less hazy day there would be an extensive view in glimpses between the bushes (planted to stabilise the slope? or the relics of old field edges?). There's a planning application to quarry on the other, uphill side of the path, which would be closed, and, when the work was over, reinstated further down. I'm glad I got to walk it while it's there.

At the far end of the quarry we cut through the old graveyard to the road, and then down a muddy path through woodland into Cassop Vale and another didused quarry, walking this time along the flat valley floor within a steep-sided bowl, between humps and hummocks of old workings, and twisted trees: I thought about the fairies in Jo Walton's Among Others who lurk unseen in trees and bushes, and cluster in abandoned industrial settings.

Up again into Cassop itself, where we lunched at the Victoria Inn (with the mural on its end wall), and where I broke my glasses (I took them off to look at the map, and then knocked them onto the tiled floor). These things happen. Luckily the lady who waited on us was able to provide scissors and sellotape, and I set off again patched up, if with even blearier vision than usual. Luckily the really tricky walking was behind us.

From now on we were seeing the aftermath not of quarrying but of coal mining. We crossed an area of colliery reclamation. Perhaps one day it will look like natural forest, but at present the trees are yound enough that the suspicious regularity of the ground gives it away - even before we came to the information board which explained just where the pit had been (it's all heritage now).

At Kelloe - or rather, at Church Kelloe, a gap in a wall let us into a completely different atmosphere, a peaceful enclosure where the old church sits in the middle of a smoothly curved green, between the Kelloe Beck and the village, its gravestones lined up neatly along the walls of its enclosure. This is St Helen's, the twelfth century church where Elizabeth Barrett Browning was christened. Outside the churchyard is a memorial to the men and boys killed in the Trimdon Grange explosion, 26 of whom lived in Kelloe and are buried in the churchyard there.

From here we followed a disused railway line which has been converted into a heritage walk, through pleasant woodlands, though the embankment beneath our feet was black and glittering with colliery waste. And soon we were back at Coxhoe, though we still had to walk the length of the village to retrieve our car.

A map of the route