STRAWBERRY COTTAGE on the eastern edge of Hurworth is a pretty Grade II listed “early 19th Century ornamental cottage”. In recent decades, its exterior has been rendered which hides its thin, handmade bricks, although its charming arched windows remain.

It is surrounded by fields, which were once its market garden. Recently the fields have been cleared of all out-buildings – something that not even German bombers managed as during the Second World War, apparently, a stray bomb blew out half a glasshouse.

Last week, we asked for information about the cottage, and we apologise as our flippant article has caused some upset.

The Strawberry story really starts in the 1840s when George Crisp moved from Malvern in Worcestershire to be a gentleman’s servant at the Old Hall on Hurworth Green. He met Jane Gent, from Durham, and they married, moving out to Strawberry Cottage where soon they had the gardens growing well.

Sadly, when Jane was pregnant with their seventh child, George fell ill and in 1862, aged 38, he died. It is said that he contracted something unpleasant while working in the Tees repairing a sewage pipe. This may be connected to Low Hail Bridge, close to the cottage, which was built in 1879 to carry nightsoil from Hurworth over the river so that it could fertilise the fields of Eryholme.

George’s son John took on the running of the market garden, and successive generations of Crisps became well known for their greengrocers’ stalls on Darlington, Stockton and Yarm markets. Out of all the fruit and veg they sold, the only items not grown in Hurworth were oranges and dates.

The Crisp connection to the cottage ended in the 1950s when they sold it to the Middlemiss family. Now the cottage awaits its next chapter.

THE surname Crisp comes from the Middle English first-name Crispin, which means “curly-haired”. St Crispin, who was martyred in 286AD, is the patron saint of shoemakers. By coincidence, George Crisp, who moved to Hurworth in the 1840s, was the son of a Worcestershire shoemaker.

TIME now for a tenuous connection, which is also one of our favourite stories. Meryl Streep has this week made the headlines because following her criticism of Donald Trump, the US president-elect tweeted that she was an “overrated actress” and a “Hillary flunky”.

So how can we connect her with Low Hail Bridge, which is a farm bridge over the Tees near the Otter and Fish pub in Hurworth?

The bridge was a joint effort between Lord Rokeby, who owned the farmland on the Yorkshire bank of the river which needed fertilising, and the Durham villagers who were producing large amounts of effluent in the natural course of their day-to-day lives.

Civil engineer Robert Robinson, of Beechwood in Darlington (where Sainsbury’s on Grange Road is today) was asked to construct a cheap bridge to carry a sewage pipe across the river. Rather than go to the expense of designing a bespoke bridge, Robinson used an off-the-shelf American design that was patented by a Connecticut architect in 1820.

It has diagonally trussed legs, which distribute the weight evenly and which can be slotted together cheaply. The bridge deck is made of wood, which was less expensive than a metal alternative.

However, the Americans discovered that the wooden deck, exposed to riverwater and rain, rotted quickly, and so they built cheap wooden roofs and sides to keep the rain out.

This type of bridge-building died out in the US at the end of the 19th Century, and by the mid 20th Century, those rural covered bridges which survived became landmarks. Indeed, author Robert James Waller wrote a 1960s love story about them. It told of a gritty yet handsome photographer who was sent on an assignment to capture the nostalgia of the covered bridges. New to the area, he stopped and asked a woman for directions to a bridge. She was pretty and lonely and married – and they began a tempestuous affair as she directed him around The Bridges of Madison County.

The book, published in 1992, is one of the 20th Century’s best sellers; the film, made in 1995, stars Clint Eastwood as the photographer and Meryl Streep as the woman with the knowledge of bridges.

The bridge in Durham County, in Hurworth, was never covered, but it is to the same design as the Madison County bridges. And if you look beneath the wooden deck, you will still see the large black sewage pipe it was built to carry, although the pipe no longer serves its original purpose.