Places often take their names from a description of the land. CHRIS LLOYD looks at Rise Carr and Honeypot Lane

TODAY, a bog is a bog is a bog. But long, long ago a bog could have been a flatt or a holme, an ing or a haugh, a mire or a carr or a flaske.

It might have been a marsh, a morass or a meadow. Or, of course, it could have been a bottom.

All of these words – and plenty more beside – were descriptions of the sogginess of a boggy piece of land near a waterway (that’s a beck, a burn, a syke, a stream, a stell, a runner etc depending on the nature of that waterway).

A flatt, for example, was usually a dry piece of land by a river; a holme was a piece of land by a river that was usually dry until the river was in flood.

A flaske was a fairly soggy place; a mire would have been a very soggy place, and a carr was an extremely soggy place – often it was the soggiest piece of the mire, the very bottom of the mire.

There are plenty of carrs in the mires around the River Skerne between Aycliffe and Sedgefield: Preston Carrs, Mordon Carr, Swan Carr, Bradbury Carr and New Homer Carr.

At the north end of Darlington, there’s Rise Carr, a boggy piece of land where the “rice” – scrubby, planty, twiggy things – grew.

One of the main roads running through the rise carr was Honeypot Lane. Echo Memories said a fortnight ago that it derived its name from a lovely, romantic custom involving newly-weds honeymooning on mead to maintain the male’s virility.

Alternatively, the Honeypot Lane got its name because it was such a muddy, sticky lane – exactly the sort of lane you’d expect to find running through a bog.

The lane gave its name to the one big house in the district: Honeypot House.

Over the course of the 20th Century, Honeypot Lane changed its name to Longfield Road and Honeypot House was demolished. To confuse matters, there is still a Honeypot House on Longfield Road – a very distinctive building adorned with swooping eagles and a towering fountain – but this was originally Honeypot Cottage. It is Grade II listed and said to date from the early 18th Century. Originally, though, it was just a workers’ cottage in the shadow of its bigger and older neighbour, Honeypot House, on its eastern side.

“The original Honeypot House was derelict when I first saw it,” says Rise Carr lad Malcolm Middleton, “but even through the tangled undergrowth of the front garden, you could see it had been a lovely house in its day.”

In the 1850s, it was the home of Robert Thompson. Its estate was much of the north end of Darlington – until Robert built Thompson Street across it in 1859.

On the proceeds, he moved into a bigger house, Tees Grange, and sold Honeypot House to John Henry Garbutt.

Industry was eating into Rise Carr. In 1825, the Stockton and Darlington Railway had been driven across the carr. In 1864, Theodore Fry (newly-married into the Pease family) and Charles I’Anson (founder of the Whessoe foundry) bought five acres of land beside the railway and formed the Rise Carr Rolling Mills. For their workers to live in they built terraces, the first ones called Fry Street and I’Anson Street.

Fortunately, Mr Garbutt was also an industrialist. He was a coal owner and a brick manufacturer. In 1866, he sold part of the Drinkfield clay pit where he made his bricks to a co-operative of trades unionists. They set up an ironworks without any nasty bosses (as Echo Memories told in 2002). And without any nasty bosses, the ironworks collapsed in acrimony within a couple of years. Mr Garbutt, the capitalist, bought the land back cheaply. He, though, was unable to make a go of the ironworks and it was levelled in 1879.

Today, the scene of this intriguing industrial experiment is the “civic amenity site” (ie: dump) and a boggy nature reserve with some interesting industrial bumps in it.

Mr Garbutt sold Honeypot House to Henry Warwick who, in 1887, had bought the Victoria Brewery at the top of Fry and I’Anson streets. To the brewery he added a chain of pubs.

Mr Garbutt died in 1900, aged 57. His was “a very sudden death…a great shock”, according to his obituary. He’d been travelling in Wensleydale and Swaledale, meeting his tenants. At Richmond, one of his tenants complemented him on how well he was looking.

“I’ve never felt better in my life,” he replied heartily.

But he was looking forward to getting back to Honeypot House and his wife and 13 children. One of his children, a Lieutenant Warwick, was volunteering to go to the front (presumably South Africa). “We want to protect our old country, you know,” he told his tenant cheerily.

He checked into his usual hotel, the Bishop Blaize, in Richmond. And died. Of “a severe attack of inflammation of the bowels”.

His eldest son, Ernest, took over the brewery and Honeypot House. But he was troubled by epilepsy and had to sell the brewery to Vaux in the early 1920s – the Victoria Maltings remained in Rise Carr until at least the outbreak of the Second World War.

Ernest’s epilepsy worsened and in 1926, in Honeypot House, he committed “suicide while temporarily insane”.

From that sad ending, Honeypot House was never a home again. It fell derelict. Its gardens were incorporated into North Park which, as Echo Memories told a fortnight ago, had been created in 1894-96.

And because of Ernest’s sad ending, word spread that Honeypot was a haunted house, the sort of place that scared children.

During the Second World War, the Air Raid Precautions people used the house for storage.

In 1946, Daralum Castings Ltd took it over. Daralum stood for Darlington Aluminium, and this company specialised in making pots and pans. In 1954, Daralum became the first company in Britain to make pans out of a new US alloy called Frontier 40E, and in 1960 it moved to larger premises on Albert Hill.

Honeypot House fell empty once more. This time, it was pulled down and so, after centuries, the rise carr lost its premier house.

With many thanks to Malcolm Middleton