EXACTLY 200 years ago on May 27, solicitor Thomas Davison was flying about the south Durham countryside on his horse, working his finger to the bone as only a solicitor can.

May 27, 1814, was, though, a Friday. Tomorrow would be the weekend. He'd be able to relax at his home in Sedgefield...

But before his working week was over, Mr Davison had one last chore to perform. In his pocket was a letter he'd written to a client in Stokesley about a complicated land deal in Weardale. He needed to post that letter.

About five miles from home, he charged through the hamlet of Rushyford – a busy crossroads on the Great North Road.

At Rushyford, there was everything a hurrying traveller needed: the Eden Arms was a bustling coaching inn, with stables for 30 horses, so he could change his steed if needed; there was a blacksmith who would re-shoe his animal or repair his wheels if they'd been damaged by the terrible potholes of the Great North Road.

And, in the front room of a terraced house, there was a post office where he could post his letter.

Mr Davison stopped and committed his letter to the care of the Royal Mail. Unburdened, he charged off for the weekend to Sedgefield.

Two hundred years later, by the power of eBay, his letter has returned to the place that he posted it, bought by John Newbould, who now owns the old smithy which is just a couple of doors away from the former post office, where Peter Troy lives.

The lay-out of Peter's house shows that the post office was just a thin sliver – possibly an old alleyway that an entrepreneur had knocked into when he spotted the need for travellers to post letters. But it is its size that makes it famous. When it closed in 1989, it was said to be the smallest post office in Great Britain.

Mr Davison's letter reveals that he had been measuring land up at the top of Weardale on behalf of his client, the Reverend Henry Hildyard of Stokesley.

Mr Hildyard had obviously come in to money: in 1806, he had bought the manor of Stokesley, and in 1808, he had bought Horsley Hall, a 17th Century country house near Eastgate, plus land at Lintzgarth near Rookhope and Unthank near Stanhope.

But, that May day in 1814, Mr Davison was struggling to work out precisely what Mr Hildyard owned. With his scratchy inkpen, he wrote: "I am at a loss to know."

And he concluded his letter: "I am extremely sorry to give you so much trouble, but before I can make a Report, you must produce your Deeds and show by them that the stints on the pastures claimed by you are freehold to the satisfaction of Mr Griffith of Durham, who is Solicitor General to the Bishop of Durham."

The implication is that the wool cannot easily be pulled over the Solicitor General's eyes.

We don't know how the case unravelled, although we do know that Mr Hildyard died in 1833, leaving his property to his son, Lieutenant-Colonel Robert Hildyard. Robert personally paid for Stokesley Town Hall to be built and in 1850, when he became High Sheriff of Durham, he gave his address as Horsley Hall and Unthank – so it looks like our letter-writing solicitor from Sedgefield did manage to untangle the land deal.

THE old smithy and the old post office are either end of a terrace of cottages that was built by the Eden family of nearby Windlestone Hall to house estate workers. The Edens were connected with the hall – now the subject of controversy due to allegations that Durham County Council sold it too cheaply a couple of years ago – for more than 400 years. Their reign came to an end on November 12, 1936, when, with death duties crowding in on him, Sir Timothy Eden, the 8th baronet, auctioned the 4,000 acre estate at the King's Head Hotel in Darlington.

At the time of the auction, Sir Timothy's younger brother, Anthony, had just become one of Britain's youngest ever Foreign Secretaries. Great things were hoped of him, but he is remembered from the mid-1950s rather unkindly as the Prime Minister who took the great out of Great Britain due to his mishandling of the Suez crisis.

THE last Rushyford postmaster was Jane Aldred, who retired in 1989 after 39 years in the country's smallest post office. She had succeeded her mother, Isabella Hunter, who had run it since 1900.

Today, Mr Troy runs his publicity business from the posty and Mr Newbould has converted the smithy into the House of Eden pre-school nursery. You can win one of his pens in our weekly Caption Competition in today's Weekend magazine.

THERE are some place names that need to be explained. Rushyford is the most obvious – it is where the Great North Road forded a little stream, known locally as the Black Beck. Rushes must have grown there.

Lintzgarth, near Rookhope, sounds a little curious, but it comes from an Old English word "hlinc" meaning hill. Apparently, when William the Conqueror made the English speak French, the French tongue altered the pronunciation of "hlinc" to "linz". Lintzgarth means "the field on the hill".

Best of all is Unthank. It is another Old English word meaning "without leave". This suggests that Unthank was occupied by someone who had no right to be there – it is a squatter's farm.

MEMORIES 176 asked about Kayshall Farm, the extraordinary derelict hulk, which is about to be demolished, at the centre of Evenwood. Tom Hutchinson points to a reference in Fordyce's 1857 history of County Durham. Of Evenwood it says: "There was formerly an old castle here, but its remains were totally demolished in 1826, and its site is now occupied by a farmhouse." Could this farmhouse be Kayshall, or can anyone tell us where Evenwood Castle once was?

MANY towns suffered at the hands of the bulldozers in the 1960s, but few quite as badly as Stockton. One of the pre-demolition pictures in Memories 178 caught the eye of Clive Wilkinson of Langley Park. It showed the grand Stockton Literary and Philosophical Institute, built in 1839.

"I attended Stockton Technical School from 1947 to 1949," he says. "We had no premises to call our own and used various rooms around the High Street, including the top floor of the Lit & Phil. It was a fairly dingy place artificial light was needed most days except when the sun was shining in the morning. Then, shafts of bright light flooded in via the “port-hole” style windows in the mansard roof."

Clive clearly knows his roofs. A mansard roof, according to the Memories dictionary, has two slopes on it, the lower one being much steeper than the upper one. It is named after François Mansart, a 17th Century French architect whose buildings were "renowned for their high degree of refinement, subtlety, and elegance".

The Stockton Lit & Phil, mansard roof and all, was demolished in 1964.