BEAMISH LAUNCHES GEORGIAN LANDSCAPE

Beamish, North East England's award-winning Museum, has recently launched a recreated 1820s landscape, thanks to funding from the County Durham Environmental Trust (CDENT).

As part of a project to recreate Georgian countryside typical in the region immediately prior to industrialisation, CDENT has donated a grant of £120,000 through the Landfill Tax Credit Scheme.

The new landscape harks back to an era when enclosures, collieries and early railways were changing the face of County Durham. It incorporates riven oak field gates, stone gateposts, or stoops, along with stone flagging access routes, to reflect the Georgian landscape which had few straight lines or flat areas.

Several fields have been transformed with ridge and furrow ploughing, a key element to farming from medieval times, which enabled farmers to grow different types of crops in the same field, with dry conditions on the ridges and wet in the furrows. And to complete the effect, typical hedgerows have been planted then sown with thousands of wild flower seeds of the period. Set into this landscape is a recreation of an 1820s Colliery, complete with its own working horse gin and wooden waggonway.

Much development work in the 1825 area at Beamish has already been undertaken, with the opening of Pockerley Manor and Pockerley Waggonway. The Georgian landscape project sets these two wonderful attractions in the appropriate rural context.

Miriam Harte, Director of Beamish, said: “We would like to thank CDENT for their much appreciated assistance on this great project. This will allow Beamish to represent a lost landscape from the days when the region's creativity was about to change the North East and most of the wider world forever.”

Chairman of CDENT, John Wearmouth, added: “Museum visitors will now be able to ride behind the replica steam engines and look out onto fields reminiscent of those seen by the first travellers on the railways, almost two centuries ago.”

“But this is landscape not just for pleasure, it will also demonstrate what can be achieved by farmers with natural fertilisers using local materials and methods from pre-industrial days.”

CDENT was formed over nine years ago and has allocated funds over £9 million – received under the Government's Landfill Tax Credit Scheme – to a host of projects that benefit the local environment and the people who live, work and visit County Durham, Darlington, Gateshead, South Tyneside and Sunderland.

Information on priorities in the CDENT strategy and other schemes funded by CDENT, under the Landfill Tax Credit Scheme can be viewed on the website at www.cdent.co.uk

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Media Contact
Jacki Winstanley, Publicity Manager Tel: 0191 370 4024
Email: jackiwinstanley@beamish.org.uk

Issued May 2006