IN Memories 209, Peter Gallagher in Norton harked back to his childhood days in the 1950s in Bishop Auckland and asked: "There was an alleyway from Newgate Street to Fore Bondgate which had an underpass which was known locally as 'The Doctors Tunnel' – does anyone know how it got its name?"

Maureen Doyle writes from Newton Hall, Durham: "I also was born and grew up in Bishop Auckland, and my early education was at St Wilfrid's school on the Town Head. We sometimes walked through Bondgate to the Market Place to catch the No 9 Town Service bus to Cockton Hill where we lived, but we never went near Doctors Tunnel as we had heard scary stories about ghosts which haunted there."

Maureen also has a theory about how the tunnel came by its name: "During the Middle Ages, people of the same trade and profession lived in streets named after the trade concerned, hence there's Tenters Street in Bishop where the tenters worked, or Saddler Street where leatherworkers were based, and in Durham City we have Fleshergate where the butchers worked."

Fleshergate is at the Market Place end of Durham's Saddler Street. A little street called Walkergate also used to run in to Durham's Market Place, and it, like Bishop's Tenter Street, was home to wool workers.

Let's explain: before it could be used, wool had to be cleaned in the "fulling process". It was placed in a trough with water and "fullers' earth" – a clay-like substance which acted like soap. It was then pounded with clubs or walked upon by people called walkers. This cleaned the wool and splattered it so that it became thicker.

The wool was then stretched and dried on wooden frames called tenters. The wool was attached to the tenters by hooks – tenterhooks.

As well as creating street names, the fulling process created surnames: Fullers, Walkers and Tuckers were all involved in it.

Anyway, back to Maureen's letter. "I understand that the Bishop Auckland apothecaries and surgeons had their premises in Bondgate and Doctors Tunnel was their way out into the town when they went visiting their patients," she says.

Of course, we got onto this because in the 1920s a runaway lion was apprehended by a policeman in Doctors Tunnel. Has anyone got any more information or memories about it – and do the ghosts still haunt?

ON a similar theme, recent Memories have been debating Carmel Road, an old coal road that ran around the western edge of Darlington. It enabled coalmen travelling from the south Durham pits to sell their wares in Yorkshire to avoid Darlington town centre where they would have to pay tolls.

J Wade in Esh Winning has been studying an early 19th Century map which shows a track, which we know as Carmel Road, passing close to a house which the map says is "Carmel House Convent, formerly Cockerton Field House, home to Carmelite or Teresian nuns. The estate was formerly owned by Hodgsons and Wetheralls".

The Carmelite order of nuns was founded in the 12th Century on Mount Carmel in Israel, which had been home to the prophet Elijah in 900BC.

Henry VIII's dissolution of monasteries and nunneries drove the nuns out of Britain in the 1530s, and they settled in Belgium.

"The French revolutionists drove them out of there and they arrived back in London on July 7, 1794," writes J Wade. "Sir John Lawson of Brough moved them to St Helens Auckland in 1804. Then they went to Cocken Hall, Durham, where they stayed till 1830 when the establishment of a pit caused them to move to Cockerton Field House."

Field House was by then at least 300 years old – the Hodgson family had occupied it from roughly 1650 to 1750, and its most notable recent resident had been, as the map says, John Wetherall, a shorthorn cattle breeder.

After the Napoleonic Wars, British agriculture collapsed and Field House was put up for sale in 1818. In her book Rural Darlington, Vera Chapman quotes the estate agent's blurb which described the house as "a commodious mansion, seated in a park-like paddock, relieved by a large sheet of water, and approached by a carriage drive through a thriving plantation".

It included "a noble lofty eating room", and had six first-floor bedrooms with five dressing rooms, and seven upper storey servants' rooms.

There were "three good arched vaults for wine and ale" and a brewhouse, and a coach house with room for three carriages. The walled kitchen gardens included a peachery, grapery, hot house and melon pit.

Despite such elegance, there were no takers, and Field House stood empty until the miners of Cocken Hall drove out the 20 Carmelite nuns in 1830. The nuns enlarged the house, added a chapel, and stayed for 180 years.

In May 2012, planning permission was granted for the convent to be converted into a 60-bed residential care home, but work appears not to have begun.