Last weekend's Heritage Open Days offered a rare opportunity to see the scenes that inspired one of our greatest writers to create one of his most memorable novels. Echo Memories investigates.

THE footprints beneath the evergreen tree belong to Charles Dickens. With the moors rising to his left, horsedrawn coaches clattering along the main street to his right, and snowmelt dripping off the evergreen's branches and down his neck, the novelist stood in the long, damp grass of Bowes churchyard in front of a gravestone.

Today - 170 years later - you can stand on the self-same spot as Dickens and, through the lichen and the green slime of time, read the same words on the headstone.

They say that the grave belongs to George Ashton Taylor, from Wiltshire, who "died suddenly at William Shaw's Academy of this place, April 13, 1823, aged 19 years".

A shudder must have passed right through Dickens, from the top of his fur hat to the tips of his boots leaving footprints in the snow, as he read the rhyme at the bottom: Young reader thou must die And after this, the judgement But young Dickens - five days short of his 26th birthday but already fairly famous following the publication of the Pickwick Papers - was preparing to pass judgement on the practice of "boy farming" that once was so lucrative in Teesdale.

And as he stood there, reading Taylor's headstone, inspiration struck.

"Isuppose, " wrote Dickens, "his heart broke - the camel falls down 'suddenly' when they heap the last load upon his back - and he died at that wretched place. I think his ghost put Smike into my mind upon the spot. " In the resultant novel, Nicholas Nickleby, poor simple Smike is a central character. He has a loyal heart of gold but is cruelly beaten by his schoolmaster. Within weeks of Dickens creating him in print, his story captured the imagination of the country.

He became emblematic of the victims of the "Yorkshire Schools", the barbarous institutions where, for £20-a-year, unwanted boys were stashed out of sight and out of mind in the far-flung Pennines.

There were such establishments near Ripon and Richmond, but around Barnard Castle they were "sprinkled plentifully". Startforth and Cotherstone had several "prison schools" - the boys were not allowed holidays - but Bowes was the capital.

Its first school had begun before 1749, and by the time Dickens arrived in 1838, there were more than 800 boys housed in half-adozen educational establishments.

The teachers needed no qualifications - other than a cruel nature. For instance, George Clarkson ran a school in Bowes Hall (his most famous old boy was Richard Cobden, founder of the Anti-Corn Law League). Clarkson hired out his pupils to labour on local farms.

One night in 1820, Clarkson returned home drunk from the Ancient Unicorn pub to find the school usher carousing with the boys. He tried to rouse his wife from her drunken slumber to tackle the riot.

Everyone, staff and pupils alike, seems to have been so inebriated that the everyday episode fizzled out.

It would have been forgotten - except that next morning, Mrs Clarkson was found dead at the foot of the stairs.

Memories were, understandably, hazy. The usher was charged with murder, but acquitted, and within a year Clarkson had remarried and, with another mouth to feed, was still running his brutal academy.

It was to research such outrages that on Wednesday, January 31, 1838, Dickens caught the Glasgow Mail coach out of London.

Accompanied by his cartoonist Hablot "Phiz" Browne, he was rattled 255 miles in 27 hours up the Great North Road and, turning left into a blizzard at Scotch Corner, along the wilds of the transPennine turnpike.

Inthe pocket of his greatcoat Dickens had a newspaper cutting - perhaps torn from the Durham Advertiser, The Northern Echo's sister paper.

It was headlined "Cruelty of a schoolmaster". In 1823, two pupils of William Shaw's Academy in Bowes alleged that Mr Shaw's gross neglect had caused them to go blind.

William Jones, 11, told a court in London how the pupils washed in a horse trough, shared two towels, ate meagre unappetising rations and slept five to a bed in a 30-bed dormitory. Their first job every morning was to de-flea their beds with quills.

"If they did not catch all the fleas they were beaten, " said the report.

"On Sunday, they had pot skimmings for tea, in which there was vermin; the ushers offered a penny for every maggot, but on their being found, the ushers would not pay them.

"About nine months after Jones had been to the school, his sight was affected; he could not see to write his copy, and Mr Shaw threatened to beat him. " The boy was sent to the washhouse where he remained for a month, by which time he was completely blind. As were nine other boys sharing the wash-house with him.

Mr Shaw was found guilty of two charges of gross neglect and ordered to pay £600 damages - a huge amount of money, akin to a quarter of a million pounds today.

He returned to Bowes and continued to run his academy.

Dickens determined to meet him.

The coach stopped at about 11pm at the George and New Inn at Greta Bridge - today, next door to the Peel House farm shop on the A66. A nithered Dickens was "in a perfect agony of apprehension" due to the dreariness of the moor and the coldness of the snow. But inside he found roaring fires, capital bedrooms and "a smoking supper and a bottle of mulled port".

Next morning, a post chaise took him into Barnard Castle, where he took rooms in the King's Head, a grand coaching inn in the Market Place which is now a care home.

He introduced himself to a local solicitor, Richard Barnes, and purported to be acting for a widow who wished to place her son in a Yorkshire school. Mr Barnes outlined the local options and then Dickens went for a walk.

At the top of the Bank, he popped into Thomas Humphrey's clockmaker's shop, which later inspired him to call his weekly story magazine Master Humphrey's Clock (the tales in the magazine were so engrossing that they would make time fly).

At the bottom of the Bank, he visited a school run in a top room by a Mr McKay. He had been recently sacked as an usher by Mr Shaw and, fuelled by revenge, had tales to tell of his former employer.

Then Dickens crossed the County Bridge to inspect a school in Startforth, before returning to dine well at the King's Head.

Unexpectedly, Mr Barnes reappeared, and in a broad Barney accent pleaded with Dickens to stop the widow sending her son to a Yorkshire schoolmaster.

Dickens wrote down his exact words - "I'm dom'd if ar can gang to bed and not telee, for the weedur's sak, to keep the lattle boy from our schoolmeasthers" - and wrote him into Nicholas Nickleby as John Browdie, a straight-talking Yorkshire hero.

Next morning, Dickens and Phiz, his friend and illustrator, headed for Bowes.

Their post chaise dropped them at the Unicorn, where they dined splendidly, before walking along the main street to Mr Shaw's Academy.

They knocked on the door. Mr Shaw answered.

The grapevine had warned him that a young London writer was peering into awkward corners and dredging up old court cases that were best forgotten.

He didn't let them in. But they had seen him and spoken to him.

The academy became Dotheboys Hall, and the real William Shaw became the fictional Wackford Squeers who so dreadfully abused the boy Smike.

As Dickens stood in the doorway of Dotheboys Hall - now divided into five residences - he noticed Mr Shaw "had but one eye".

Squeers had a similar disadvantaged. Dickens described: "The eye he had was unquestionably useful, but decidedly not ornamental, being of a greenish grey, and in shape resembling the fan-light of a street door. " And perhaps as he stood in the doorway, he glanced behind the oneeyed Shaw into the coachyard and saw the pump and trough in which the boys washed.

It was enough. Dickens and Phiz returned to the King's Head, dined well and left next morning for Darlington and thence via stagecoach to York and London.

The research was complete.

Within two months, the first instalment of Nicholas Nickleby was published.

Within four months, London was ablaze with indignity at the inhumanity of the Yorkshire schools. Within 18 months, Mr Shaw's wife Bridget, who had been cruelly caricatured by Dickens, was dead of a broken heart. Within two years, all the Yorkshire schools in Teesdale were broken up.

The pen had proved mightier than the schoolmaster's cane, and Bowes' place in literary history was assured.

There is, of course, another side to the story.

There is a feeling that Mr Shaw was harshly treated by Dickens.

There is even another grave in the district that claims to be the real last resting place of Smike.

Those tales will have to wait for another day.