PLACE of “sweet retirement” is perhaps the most intriguing of all the Heritage Open Days visits on offer this weekend.

You may retire sweetly to a centuries-old walled garden where tomorrow afternoon a free concert will revive an 18th Century Durham tradition of musical promenades.

The garden is at Old Durham.

Most people think of Durham cathedral as being pretty old, but the monks who pitched up there carrying St Cuthbert’s body in AD995 were just johnny-come-latelys – man had been at Old Durham, to the east, for millennia.

Overlooking Old Durham is Mount Joy which recent investigations have shown to be a prehistoric place of great religious significance.

Pre-Christian people appear to have been continuously worshipping there from 3,000BC to 300BC.

Even its name suggests the joy a pilgrim feels at reaching it at the end of their journey.

Next to Mount Joy is Maiden Castle which again is a notable promontory above the River Wear – a “dun” was an Old English word for a hill or a mountain. There are several Maiden Castles – “big hills”

– in Britain, including one on the moors above Reeth in Swaledale and another, more famously, in Dorset.

They were topped by Iron Age forts, with protective ditches encircling the hill to keep the enemy out in the thousand years before the birth of Christ.

Then we pop over the Wear to Old Durham itself where in Roman times there was a villa complete with bath-house. It is even said the Romans re-routed Old Durham Beck so that it acted as a protective gully.

Unfortunately, pre-Second World War quarrying destroyed most of the Romans’ remains, but when they left in the 4th Century, Old Durham continued as a farm on the river’s fertile floodplain.

By Henry VIII’s time in the 16th Century, it belonged to Kepier Hospital – a poor house, founded by the Bishop of Durham – in Gilesgate.

As it was the richest hospital in the diocese, Henry confiscated its lands and sold the Old Durham farm to a Londoner, John Heath, in 1569. A wealthy fellow, Heath built a mansion there, and in the 1630s, his great-grandson, also John Heath, used the dramatic slope of the Wear’s floodbank to create a pleasure garden.

When Mr Heath died in 1665, Old Durham was inherited by his daughter, Elizabeth, who had married John Tempest, the first MP for Durham.

The Tempests remained at Old Durham for a couple of generations, renovating their walled gardens in the 1720s. But their 150-yearold mansion was now beginning to look its age, so they moved out to Sherburn, and it fell down, its stone carted off to make new buildings.

IN 1748, the gardens became a commercial nursery, run by John Thackray, who began holding concerts in the elegant surroundings.

He attracted a “very large and genteel” audience, and even the celebrated composer John Garth, the organist at Durham Cathedral, put on a show.

In 1787, William Hutchinson, the Barnard Castle solicitor and historian, visited Old Durham. He wrote: “The gardens are formed into terraces of a considerable length.

This sweet retirement has become a place of public resort, where concerts of music have frequently been performed in the summer evenings, and the company regaled with fruit, tea, etc. The gardens are open all summer for rural recreation. “ In fact, it became a Durham fashion to promenade out from the city for a concert in the gardens. By the early 19th Century, the promenaders were able to refresh themselves at the Pineapple Inn at Old Durham – a pineapple being a symbol of lavish hospitality.

Perhaps too lavish, because in 1926 the Pineapple lost its licence due to “unruly behaviour”.

But it continued to serve soft drinks to revellers who continued to come out for picnics and openair dances until the outbreak of the Second World War when all such jollity suddenly stopped. After nearly 200 years, the dancing at Old Durham came to an end, and the gardens fell into disrepair.

In 1985, Durham City Council bought the gardens and began a programme of restoration, helped by a Friends group which in 2012 staged the first concert in the gardens for 80 years.

The gardens are open today with tomorrow’s free concert recreating the promenading elegance of yesteryear.