Changing Landscape

Today our site is on green belt land - the junction between the built environment and the more natural landscape. As we know it wasn't always so and until relatively recently coal mining was making a huge impact upon the landscape around Prudhoe. Now though the fields have been re-instated and the lark sings above them.

But this wasn't always the type of landscape that people knew and appreciated and Uglow in Nature's Engraver has some useful insights into how the landscape along the ridge here once looked and how it was valued by Thomas Bewick and his like.

The open land was common land, land for the poor to keep some livestock on and collect firewood. They would build shelters and occasionally fence off small plots to grow vegetables on or build rough shelters on. Further off Bewick longed to be among the 'golden whins and bracken of the fells'. But this openness was about to change...

"In 1775 the land Bewick loved himself was under threat. On 8 February the [Newcastle] Courant printed a notice of the proposed enclosure of Falcherside, Rise-moor, Mickley Moor and Prudhoe Moor, on the petition of the Duke of Northumberland, Lord of the Manor and others. Bewick mourned the loss of fells and wild spaces. 'The poor man was rooted out', he wrote later of enclosure, 'and the various mechanics of the village deprived of all the benefit of it'."

Town and country overlapped in Bewick's time Newcastle had open spaces and orchards and places like Eltringham, Mickley and Prudhoe had industry. Bewick's family was part of this and the influence was hidden underground. Coal had been mined here on a small scale since the 1400s (or earlier) and Bewick's grandfather 'had rented collieries on Eltringham Common and at Mickley Square' since 1715. Coal mining was very much part of the rural scene although Bewick's sympathy probably didn't extend to one entrepreneurs wish to make Eltringham the 'new Birmingham'.