Beeching's Legacy

Thursday's Guardian Country Diary describes a walk along a section of disused railway line between Romaldkirk and Cotherstone in Teesdale, which now forms part of the Tees Valley Railway Path.


When I was a kid I went to school on the train every day. I travelled on electric trains but those were still the dying days of steam and I can still recall the sound and the smell of steam locomotives like these thundering through the station while I waited for my sedate electric train to arrive. Along with my mates I often stood on the footbridge while the fire-breathing, steam-snorting monsters passed underneath.

The mainline steam trains are now a distant memory - and so are many of the rural railways that were axed in the Beeching closures in 1963.

This is what the rail network looked like before Beeching ......

...... and this was what remained when he'd finished his work.



But it's an ill wind that blows nobody any good, and many of the old railways lines whose tracks have been lifted are now excellent footpaths that pass through some spectacular countryside and have often become unofficial nature reserves. 

Here are some pictures of some fine local examples:





The Tees Valley Railway Path photographed in high summer this year.

A wonderfully festive hawthorn berry crop along the route this winter ...

..... with plenty of holly - Cotherstone village is in the distance.



This is a cutting along the Tees Valley Railway Path near Romaldkirk earlier this year, in February. Drifting snow that filled railway cuttings often brought trains to a standstill when lines like this in the Pennines were still in use.






The footpath along the old railway line that runs through the nature reserve at Smardale Gill in Ravenstonedale, Cumbria ....



.... where the Smardale Gill viaduct carries the line through the limestone grassland.






This is the same line, but this time on the eastern side of Kirkby Stephen, where the line travelled eastwards across the notorious Stainmore Summit - the highest railway in England.

The line east of Coxhoe in County Durham, with magnesian limestone embankments rich in wild flowers and butterflies.

And finally, the railway path through the Derwent Country Park near Gateshead, where you can walk on the track bed of the old Derwent Valley Railway through woodland to the Nine Arches viaduct and watch red kites soaring overhead.

Early Summer in Teesdale

Some pictures taken around Romaldkirk in Teesdale today.

This year has produced some of the finest displays of hawthorn blossom that I've ever seen - but here's something strange. The two hawthorns that you can see in the picture above were once part of an old hedge, so are of more or less equal age. But whereas the tree in the centre has so much blossom covering its branches that it looks like an iced wedding cake, the hawthorn on the left has almost none at all (double click for a larger image). Maybe it flowered and fruited heavily last year and is having a year off...

Early June sees wood cranesbill, in the foreground, coming into bloom, while all the pastures are full of buttercups.

The curlews have chicks now, so when you walk through the fields the parent birds do their best to lure you away, uttering alarm calls to alert their chicks.....

... and there are willow warblers everywhere in the alders, searching for food for nestlings.

The old disused railway line between Romaldkirk and Cotherstone. It's a very pleasant two mile stroll between them, with good pubs at either end.



Romaldkirk. All the roadside verges in this part of the dale are frothy with cow parsley at the moment.

Wildlife on Walls: 1. Yellow Corydalis, Pseudofumaria lutea

Wildlife has a wonderful ability to colonise man-made structures that mimic natural habitats.To many organisms walls are nothing more than exposed rock faces or low, inland cliffs. These are relatively rare natural habitats in much of the British Isles but their artificial equivalents - stones walls - are everywhere, in towns and the countryside sometimes stretching for miles across the landscape and built from a wide variety of rock types, sometimes held together with mortar, sometimes merely piled one on top of another. 

Natural cliffs are a habitat colonised by specialists - plants and animal that can thrive where there's little soil, often extreme changes in temperature, shortage of water and extremes of sunlight and shade. So cliffs' artificial equivalents are similarly colonised by some interesting, highly adapted  organisms. This wall, for example, around Romaldkirk church in Teesdale, has been colonised by a wall specialist - yellow corydalis - which has an interesting method of sowing its seeds. 

Yellow corydalis Pseudofumaria lutea comes from the lower slopes of the southern Alps in Italy and Switzerland and has grown in Britain since at least 1596. Two hundred years later it was first recorded in the wild and since then it has spread throughout almost all of southern and central England, most of Wales and parts of Eastern Scotland, Northern Ireland and to a few locations in Ireland. It's still extending its range. You can view a distribution map here.

It's uncommon to find it growing anywhere other than on walls, where it thrives - and that's probably because its seeds are equipped with a structure called an elaiosome - a protein and lipid-filled extension which is irresistible to ants - so they take the seeds with their food source back to their nests, and in so doing lodge the seeds (which they don't eat) in cool, damp crevices deep within walls. For those who like botanical jargon, there's a name for this ant-aided seed sowing - myrmechocory. 


For more on dry stone walls, click here.