Catterick Village’s serenity belies its cramped location between a motorway and an Army camp. Echo Memories discovers that the North Yorkshire village has always been at the heart of the action.

STUMBLING into a North Yorkshire village more than 50 years ago, Nikolaus Pevsner was pleasantly surprised by what he found.

“Catterick is not at all what the proximity to Catterick Camp on the one hand and to the A1 on the other makes people expect,”

wrote the legendary architecture historian, who toured Britain in the Fifties and Sixties.

“It’s a quiet little place with a spacious, informal green and a stream passing along one side.”

Today, his surprise would be greater. The constant thrum and throb of the widening A1(M) and the enormous red-brick growth of the Garrison make the village an even more pleasant contrast.

On his visit, Pevsner’s fancy was taken by several historic buildings around the green, and the story of them, and the village, will feature in a local history exhibition this weekend.

Catterick, though, is the sort of place where there is as much history hidden beneath the ground as there is visible on top of it.

It is, of course, near the Roman settlement of Cataractonium, a timber fort constructed about AD80 where Dere Street – the invaders’ Great North Road – crossed the River Swale.

The Romans chose a local name that reflected the rushing, gushing nature of the Swale, and it became their administrative centre of the district from Piercebridge in the north to Aldborough in the south.

A civilian vicus, or settlement, grew up alongside the fort, supplying it with leather, pottery and metalwork.

A second phase of the fort’s development in the Third Century saw it rebuilt in stone with two new features that still mark the countryside today.

First, a bath-house was built – as recalled by the bathy-sounding Bainesse farm.

Second, a 6,000-seater amphitheatre was constructed. It doubled as a military parade ground and a public entertainment venue. Gladiatorial contests would have been popular, but it is doubtful that lions would have made it as far north as Cataractonium, so the audience probably had to make do with dog-fighting.

The amphitheatre was only discovered in 1995, yet our folk memory never forgot it.

On April 22, 1783, the first recorded horserace was held on its site, which is today Catterick Racecourse – an outdoor public entertainment venue just as it was in Roman times.

THE Romans left in the Fourth Century, opening the door for the Angles and the Saxons to invade from Germany. The native population did not lie down, and in about AD598 the people of the old north fought the Battle of Catraeth against the new invaders.

This battle is the subject of the earliest surviving British poem, Y Gododdin, which tells of a handpicked army of heroes – perhaps led by Welsh king Mynyddawg Mwynfawr – who found death and glory in defeat at Catterick.

After the battle, Catterick slipped into the dark ages, its past lost to view. When it reemerged, a couple of wealthy families had established themselves in large halls.

In 1412, Katherine of Brough Hall signed a contract with a mason, Richard of Crakehall near Bedale. Katherine was a daughter of the Aske family and a widow of the Burgh family. She instructed Richard the mason to “make the kirke of Katrik newe als Workemanschippe and mason crafte will”.

Or: “Rebuild the church, old chap, to the best of your abilities.”

For this, she paid him “eght score of markes”, and after three years she had a suitably sturdy nave in which to bury her late husband, John Burgh.

Another Burgh contract survives from this period. It is dated 1422 and is signed by William, Katherine’s son.

It instructs three masons to build a new bridge over the Swale between “the old stone brigg and the new brigg of tree”. This well humped bridge, which was widened in 1722 by John Carr, is still extremely well used.

On its southern bank is the Catterick Bridge Hotel, which has had a licence since 1535, although the nearby bridgeside chapel, where Mass was said every morning at 11am for travellers, is long gone.

WITH its bridge, Catterick settled into its life as a coaching halt on the Great North Road. Inns, alehouses and cafes lined its busy main street while quietly behind grew the village around the spacious green.

But the First World War shattered Catterick’s peace.

Farmland to the west was selected for a large military camp. There was another invasion, this time by East Anglian fishermen.

The men of Yarmouth and Lowestoft had been unable to ply their trade in the North Sea because of enemy action, and so they were despatched to North Yorkshire to build 2,000 60ft by 20ft huts to house 40,000 troops.

They didn’t stand on ceremony. In spring 1915, they plonked the first huts on top of the farmers’ first green shoots. By the summer, they were driving carts of timber through the standing corn and steamrollers through the fields of rootcrops.

Even the road bridge was commandeered. A railway line was laid over it to take supplies to the camp.

Road vehicles and trains shared the bridge until 1922 when a metal construction took the railway over the river.

Now disused, the metal skeleton still stands beside the racecourse car park. Just to the west of it runs the Catterick bypass, part of the A1(M), which was opened by Lord Chesham, the Parliamentary Secretary to the Ministry of Transport, in 1959.

The bypass took the traffic out of the village and left it the surprisingly tranquil place that Pevsner stumbled into.

He was not so impressed by what he found next door at the garrison, where the first permanent buildings went up in 1923.

In fact, he was appalled.

“There is no plan, no centre as it could have been made, no consistent theme,” he raged.

● THERE is so much history in Catterick that this weekend’s exhibition has become a two-day event.

It opens in the Catterick Social Club, in High Street, on Saturday, from 6pm to 8pm. On Sunday, it runs from 10am to 5pm. Admission is free. There are light refreshments. Displays include postcards, maps, family history, house history, military history and occupational history.

For further information, call Tony Pelton on 01748- 818703.

From a different perspective

RARE local history items will be on sale at the annual Darlington Book Fair on Saturday.

Among them will be Darlington in Silhouette, a 1902 collection of familiar shapes by the town’s most famous artist, George Algernon Fothergill, who initialled all his works “GAF”.

GAF came from Warwickshire and came to Darlington as a doctor in 1898. He fell in with the country set, by whom his sketches and horse portraits are still sought.

But in 1908 he declared himself bankrupt, owing £850 to various creditors, most of them publishers. He disappeared from Darlington and seems to have died in Sussex in 1945.

He was, though, prolific during his decade in Darlington, capturing beautiful details of the town centre from his office in Duke Street.

Darlington in Silhouette is among the Fothergill books avaialable at the Book Fair, where there will be 20 stalls selling items from across the district.

The fair is organised by Jeremiah Vokes and is in Darlington Arts Centre, Vane Terrace, from 10am to 4pm.