ACCORDING to the 2011 census, the population of Newton Aycliffe is 26,633. They all live houses built since the Second World War which have covered all the area’s old farms.

In December, we told how Lisa Marie Griffiths had recently unearthed a milkbottle in Aycliffe which went back to those agricultural days. “JT Yeoman, Simpasture Farm”, it said on it.

Now Peter Yeoman has been in touch from his farm near Black Man’s Corners in North Yorkshire. Regular readers will immediately be able to pinpoint his address because in Memories 221 a couple of years ago we were delighted to learn that Black Man’s Corners was a twisty set of icy bends on the A167 between Great Smeaton and Croft-on-Tees at the junction with the B1273 to Scorton. The corners were said to be haunted by a ghostly figure in black who was always present as motorists came spinning off the road to their doom. Perhaps disappointingly, the corners were straightened in 1973 and the man-in-black has never been seen since…

Anyway, Peter’s father was Jack Yeoman, who only died, aged 90, in April. The family were for generations dairy farmers at Wynyard and Stockton until 1952 when Jack bought Simpasture Farm, near School Aycliffe, on the western outskirts of the new town.

The farm was near the junction where the Clarence Railway left the Stockton & Darlington Railway on its way to Port Clarence on the north bank of the Tees near Middlesbrough.

Although the railway lines separated the farm from the new town, it was inevitable that developers would one day want the land, and in 1968, the Yeomans moved to their land near Black Man’s Corners. They kept farming at Aycliffe until 1975 when the council took over the farm, demolished the old farmhouse and built the Oak Leaf sports centre on the farmyard.

Peter has kindly loaned an aerial photograph of Simpasture Farm taken in the early 1950s – it can be dated by the large cornstack, which is made of sheafs (pronounced “shavs” in Yeoman dialect) awaiting threshing. Pre-development photos of Aycliffe are hard to come by so it is good to be able to show this one of the farm where, in the 1960s, the Yeomans bottled their own milk.

The Northern Echo: SIMPASTURE FARM: Harry Thompson may have put a lid on this bottle in the early 1960s

SIMPASTURE BOTTLE: From the Yeomans' farm in the early 1960s