Houses at Marley Hill

On frosty, sunny mornings a grid pattern appears
on the ground above Marley Hill shed

The grid shows the foundations of the houses in Bowes Terrace, which were back to back houses built around 1854 for workers at Marley Hill shed & the P&JR.  Each house had a 15' x 17' room downstairs, a small room in the roof space reached by ladder, and an adjoining outhouse.   Pairs of houses later had the middle wall 'knocked through' to double their size.   Eric Maxwell wrote about Bowes Terrace in Tanfield Railway News no.46 of June 1998.

Bowes Terrace on an OS map of 1914 
(Reproduced with the permission of the National Library of Scotland)

How a Bowes Terrace house may have looked

- there are no known clear photographs

The area around the pit & shed was latterly known as Old Marley Hill.   All the houses around here were demolished, many before DCC designated category D villages in the 1950s.   For more information about nearby housing, see other Tanfield Railway News of the late 1990s, or, for example, refer to Sunniside History Society's article about Waggonway Row.   We would welcome photos of & information about the houses around the shed, as well as anecdotes about the people who lived there.