IT IS great news that the Mowden Hall jobs have been saved and are to move to a new-build block beside Darlington Town Hall and alongside the multiplex development which is about to take wings. There is, though, a spectre that haunts this work. It is a ghoul which could prevent it from happening. It is the bogeyman of boggyness.

Because there were serious doubts that Feethams field, on the banks of the Skerne, could ever support the foundations of any major building because of its boggyness. By coincidence, I stumbled across those concerns only yesterday, so I thought, before anyone gets carried away with the 1,000 jobs that the new complex will bring to the centre of Darlington, I thought I should air them.

Just the word "feethams" hints at the area's boggyness. It means "home on the riverside meadow".

The first home was built on this low-lying land in about 1700 by Francis Holmes, a prosperous soapboiler. Soapboiling was quite a horrible business as over a number of days, a soapboiler boiled down bits of dead animals and lots of ash and made soap. It must have been lucrative, because Mr Holmes' home was the largest house in the borough of Darlington: it had 16 rooms, 28 windows and 55 yards of stair carpet.

Towards the end of the 18th Century, it became the home of Joseph Pease (1772-1846). He was the younger brother of Edward, the father of the railways. The house became the headquarters of the local movement to get slavery abolished, and Joseph's son, John Beaumont Pease (1803-1873) was born there.

By the start of the 20th Century, this old mansion was very ramshackle - a wing overlooking the Market Place had been turned in to the Clarence Hotel, and bus companies occupied the rest of it. A street, called Feethams, had been built down its driveway, and its pleasureground and pastures had become a rather scratty plot - auctions, fairs and markets were held on it. The reason for this scrattiness, I think, is that the council always had its eyes on Feethams as the site of a new town hall - a dream the council had harboured since Victoria was on the throne.

Which brings me to the bogeyman of boggyness.

Throughout the 1930s, the council employed various, usually eminent, architects to draw up plans for its new town hall. In 1935, Barry Webber plotted something that stretched from Tubwell Row to Horsemarket. This was rejected so in 1937, after borough surveyor Ernest Minors had drawn up new plans, architect Cowles Voysey was called in to turn them into reality in Feethams.

Malicious gossip spread round town, raising the spectre of the bogeyman of boggyness: Feethams was too watery to support a town hall.

So in January 1938, council surveyors started boring holes in Feethams to see what they can see - I've just found a photo of them in action in the Northern Despatch, while I was trying to research something else.

"Boring has been carried out in various parts of Feethams field and samples of clay and gravel indicating the strata have been taken from the bore-holes," said the Despatch. And they had concluded that "the land is suitable for an important building".

Good news.

The bad news, though, was the war prevented the important building (aka new town hall) from being built. In peacetime, all sorts of new schemes were put forward, including in the 1960s the horrifically appalling Shepherd Scheme which would have covered the entire Market Place and Low Row with a glass and concrete monstrosity. When Shepherd was thankfully rejected, the council decided to demolish the old Pease mansion of Feethams and plonk their new town hall - opened in 1970 - there.

Still they had covetous eyes on Feethams field, even if it were covered with an aesthetically unattractive bus station.

Finally, in 2013, the council is getting its way: Feethams is to have a multiplex cinema built on it alongside the new education offices. And, I am delighted to reveal, that historic tests show that the riverside land is strong enough to support those new buildings. Which is great - the bogeyman of boggyness has been laid to rest.