[This page is under development 24 December 2006]
I wrote this reference article about High Shincliffe, the village in which I live, for Wikipedia onto which I uploaded it. The version currently on Wikipedia has probably since been edited by other people.
High Shincliffe is a village in County Durham, in north-eastern England. It is situated a few miles south-east of Durham City, on the road (A177) to the village of Bowburn. The altitude of High Shincliffe is aproximately 100 metres (300 feet), and it lies 60 metres above the River Wear at Shincliffe bridge. The grid reference is NZ297400, 54° 45' 17" N, 1° 32' 15" W.
High Shincliffe is often thought of as being part of Shincliffe, although the terms Shincliffe Village and High Shincliffe are also often used to distinguish the two. The place name sign on the A177 northbound through High Shincliffe reads 'Shincliffe'.
Ecclesiastically, High Shincliffe is within the Anglican parish of Shincliffe, in the Anglican diocese of Durham. There is no church in High Shincliffe. The parish church of St. Mary is located in Shincliffe Village, where there is also a graveyard in which burials still take place. There was once a chapel in Shincliffe Colliery, remembered in the name given to the location of two houses built on the site: Chapel Place.
Politically, High Shincliffe is part of the District of Durham (i.e. Durham City), which has both a City Council and an historic mayor. High Shincliffe is also in the Durham City parliamentary constituency. Unilke both the parliamentary seat (Roberta Blackman Woods, Labour) and County Durham, with its overwhelming Labour majority, the City of Durham is administered by the Liberal Democrats. The political demography of High Shincliffe probably epitomises that liberal ethos, and it seems unsurprising that the parents of Tony Blair lived in High Shincliffe while their son was studying at university.
High Shincliffe is best characterised as a dormitory suburb of Durham City, to which the inhabitants of High Shincliffe mostly look for shopping, services and entertainment. However, there is a small, well-regarded, primary school, a recreational park with a playing field and some equipment for young children, a popular public house ('The Avenue'), a public telephone box and several bus stops. As in Shincliffe Village, there used to be a sub Post Office in High Shincliffe, close to the site of the large red letterbox at Bank Top. High Shincliffe sub Post Office also served as a small general store. The nearest sub Post Office and nearest grocery stores are in the village of Bowburn, approximately a mile to the south of High Shincliffe. The nearest public lending library is also in the village of Bowburn, although the new Clayport Library in the centre of Durham City is superior both in its range of books and its facilities. According to an engineer working for British Telecom (BT), the proportion of telephone lines into High Shincliffe is high, as are the number of broadband connections to the internet. The distance between High Shincliffe and Durham telephone exchange is too great for full-speed broadband, although this may change during 2007 with BT's roll-out of 21CN (Twenty-first Century Network). High Shincliffe is not served by a cable network. Digital television by aerial is available from the transmitter at Pontop Pike, although the quality of reception can be patchy. There is adequate, though not excellent, cellphone reception in High Shincliffe. There are no public recycling facilities in High Shincliffe, although there is a fortnightly kerbside collection of paper, cans and bottles for recycling on the same weekday as the refuse collection. Limited public recycling facilites are located in the village of Bowburn, and extensive recycling facilities are located several miles away near the village of Coxhoe.
The A177 from Durham to Bowburn, via High Shincliffe, has been partly laid out as a cycle route. High Shincliffe is served by serveral bus routes, some to local villages, and others ranging more regionally. The buses are popular, but car ownership in High Shincliffe is high, not least because most supermarket shopping is located on out-of-town sites about five miles, and a second bus journey, away (Sainsbury's and Lidl at the Arnison Centre; Tesco and Aldi in Gilesgate Moor / Dragonville). The nearest railway station is about three miles away in Durham, on the East Coast Main Line between London and Edinburgh. (The next major station to the north is Newcastle (16 minutes), and to the south is Darlington (20 minutes)). When the air is still it is possible to hear traffic on the East Coast Main Line through Hett Cut. Sometimes, in the dead of night, heavy goods trains on the East Coast Main Line cause vibrations to travel through the ground, gently shaking the houses of High Shincliffe as though a barely detectable earthquake. There are two airports, both roughly equidistant, within easy reach of High Shincliffe. To the north is Newcastle International Airport, the major of the two airports; to the south is Durham Tees Valley Airport (formerly Teesside Airport). High Shincliffe is usually on the flight path into Newcastle Airport for air traffic from or via southern England. High Shincliffe is within a mile of the A1(M) motorway from London to Edinburgh, although the nearest motorway junction is two miles away, just beyond the village of Bowburn. Traffic on the motorway, although not loud, is frequently audible. In summary, High Shincliffe can be thought of as well-located for convenience of travelling locally, regionally, nationally and internationally.
The A177 road running south-east from Durham is marked on Ordnance Survey maps as a Roman road: Cade's Road. This Roman road ran from Newcastle in the north, southwards through Chester-le-Street, crossed the River Wear at Shincliffe (Village), climbed Shincliffe Bank, ran straight through Bowburn and Coxhoe, passed the site of a deserted medieval village called Garmondsway, just south of Coxhoe, through to Sedgefield, crossed the River Tees at Piercebridge, and continued southwards eventually to the River Humber. During the nineteenth century the road running past Shincliffe Colliery was known as Turnpike Road.
High Shincliffe was formerly known as Shincliffe Colliery, as shown on the Ordnance Survey map of 1856-1865. According to Durham Mining Museum, a shaft into a coal mine was first sunk here on 11 September 1837. Two years later the mine started to produce coal. By 1840 the colliery was in full production, mining a seam of coal (the Hutton seam) six feet (two metres) thick at a depth of 400 feet (120 metres), which was 100 feet (30 metres) below sea level. Most of the pre-twentieth century houses in High Shincliffe date from this period, including Quality Street. In total, 18 people were killed at the mine, the youngest being a girl aged nine years who strayed onto the waggonway and was crushed by some waggons. The mine was finally closed, considered exhausted, in 1875, from which time the population of the village declined substatially. This decline can be seen on the Ordnance Survey map of 1894-1899. The Ordnance Survey maps of 1919-1926, 1938-1950 and 1951-1959 show only a handful of rows of houses remaining. By the time of the 1960-1969 Ordnance Survey map there were even fewer houses, and the name Shincliffe Colliery was finally lost. The only cartographical indication that these dwellings were separate from Shincliffe (Village), is the retention of the name 'Bank Top' for the houses that clustered around the Post Office at the top of Shincliffe Bank ('bank' being the local name for a small hill up which a road climbs). However, due to changes at County Council level, the building of a major housing development and primary school was undertaken, the house-builders Leech being a significant contractor. (It is interesting to note that many of the new houses had heating oil pumped directly into their central heating systems from a central storage facility, and it is still possible to see the pipework as it enters a house. The system is unlikely to have been used for long as the price of heating oil rose steeply not long after the houses were completed, making the use of heating oil uneconomic.) The 1970-1979 Ordnance Survey map shows not only this substantial housing estate, but also a name change of the location to Shincliffe Bank Top. The ensuing Ordnance Survey map (1980-1994) shows some additions to this housing estate, but also a further name change to 'High Shincliffe'.
There used to be a public house close to Bank Top, at the junction between Avenue Street and Whitwell Acres, and a large 'Y', being the initial for Young's brewery, can still be seen in the domestic house that stands on the corner. The only public house in High Shincliffe now is The Avenue, on Avenue Street.
Most evidence of the nineteenth century colliery has long vanished. However, some houses of the period remain, such as Quality Street, Pond Street and The Avenue. A few old walls can be found. The school is built on site of the pit-head, and the centre circle of the school's football pitch marks the spot where the coal mine shaft was sunk. A pit-heap remains, overgrown with birch trees, and is used by dog owners to toilet their pets. The line of the colliery waggon-way runs from the pit-head northwards past Manor Farm and on to Shincliffe Lane. This was the route that coal was originally transported from the mine, and thence to the coast where it was loaded onto colliers. South-east from the pit-head, however, a waggon-way was extended to what was once the main railway line from London to Edinburgh, the junction being named Shincliffe Station. This railway line, the Leamside Line, running from Ferryhill to the south, via Sherburn, to Washington, and thence to both Newcastle and to Sunderland (connecting with what is now the Tyne & Wear Metro at South Hylton), remained in occasional use until the early 1990s. Substantial subsidence has almost certainly undermined any plans to re-open the line.
Much of High Shincliffe was built in the 1970s, consisting of detached and semi-detached single and two storey houses with gardens to front (mostly open plan) and rear. The estate has a tranquil atmosphere, with many tidily kept gardens, some trees, and a high density of both domestic cats and garden birds such as sparrows, blue tits, great tits, coal tits, long-tailed tits, pied wagtails, yellow wagtails, chaffinches, green finches, gold finches, yellow hammers, tree creepers, starlings, blackbirds, song thrushes, mistle thrushes, redwing, swallows, swifts, house martins (there are sand martins close by), magpies, jackdaws, rooks. A colony of collared doves lives somewhere near the school, as does a feral dark-feathered cockerel (named 'Rocky'). Wood pigeions are surprisingly uncommon. Occasioanl garden visitors are great spotted woodpeckers, little owls (there are barn owls close by) and sparrow hawks (there are kestrels close by). Partridge and pheasant live in the surrounding fields. (Kingfishers live on the River Wear near Shincliffe Village.) Bats are quite numerous during the warmer months, as are mice and shrews when the weather turns colder. There are few rabbits, and almost no hares; there are few weasels and no stoats. Foxes rear their young close by, and it is sometimes possible to watch the cubs playing in the fields as evening turns to night. Badgers and red deer live close by, but unlike the foxes are rarely if ever to be seen in the housing estate. Grey squirrels are becoming increasingly evident, but moles less so. Hedgehogs are common garden visitors, as are frogs. Toads and newts are less common, as are small sand-coloured lizards and slow worms. Slugs and snails thrive well in the heavy clay soil.
High Shincliffe is surrounded by farmland and farm houses supporting a mixture of crops (cereals and rapeseed) and livestock (cows and sheep). There are many brakes of mixed, largely deciduous woodland, and these are used as shelters to rear pheasants which are then shot for sport. There are no rivers in High Shincliffe, although the River Wear is only a mile away at Shincliffe bridge. Whitwell Beck rises in High Shincliffe, and may account for the prevalence of amphibian creatures. There are both footpaths and bridleways criss-crossing the fields.
High Shincliffe lies on Carboniferous Coal Measures, from which coal was mined for several decades. The principal seam mined was the Hutton Seam. However, 'boulder clay' glacial drift is of sufficient depth to prevent outcropping. Two sand pits can be found towards Shincliffe Village, and whilst of no economic value now, will have had some significance in times past. It can be speculated that these pockets of sand resulted from small rivers outflowing from retreating glaciers at the end of the last Ice Age about 10,000 years ago. Sand martins build their nests in these sand pits. Visible from High Shincliffe to the south west, south, south east and east are escarprments of Permian magnesian limestone, which is intensively quarried for roadstone throughout the region. Whilst tempting to believe that Shincliffe Bank is of the same nature as these escarpments, it is more likely to be the south easterly bank of a deep flood plain following the course of a swollen, immediately-post-glacial River Wear. The bank is sufficiently lengthy that a water trough for the refreshment of draught horses can still be seen on the southbound side of the A177 close to the Seven Stars public house at the High Shincliffe end of Shincliffe Village. Of note, too, is a spring in the bank on the same side of the road several hundred metres towards High Shincliffe.
