THE spread of archive pictures in Memories 321 featured the Egglestons of Teesdale: the village which does not have an e at the end of its name and the abbey, ten miles away, which does.

Mike Lee of Blackwell, Darlington, has since lent us his 1919 catalogue of the sale of the 10,000 acre Eggleston "residential, sporting and agricultural" estate. If you worry about such things as the correct spelling of place names, the catalogue talks consistently of "Egglestone" whereas the 1919 newspaper reports of the sale all speak of "Eggleston".

The estate was broken down into 98 lots, including 6,000 acres of grouse moor that was then let to the fabulously wealthy Conservative politician William Burdett-Coutts. It included the Blackton Smelting Mill, flue and chimney stalk, which did not sell, and neither did the mineral water manufactory in the village. It also included 30 farms, some of which had lovely names: Toby Hill, Foggerthwaite House, Handkerchief Plantation and Ormasley Hill, for example.

At the centre of the estate was Lot 18, Eggleston Hall, built in 1818 on the site of a much older manor house for the Hutchinson family, designed by Ignatius Bonomi, who is regarded as Durham's first architect.

With seven principal bedrooms it was, said the sale catalogue, "beautifully situate on the banks of the Tees, 700ft above sea level, with extensive views across the Tees Valley and the Yorkshire Moors".

The "mature and sheltered" grounds included a "substantial three-span stone private footbridge over the sunken main road leading to the Great Wood and the walks therein, with the wooded strip called Nabgill and Waterfalls, with the tennis lawn".

It was bought by Sir William Cresswell Gray for £27,500 (about £1.3m in today's values, according to the Bank of England's Inflation Calculator), the West Hartlepool shipbuilder who already owned a mansion at Thorp Perrow, near Bedale.

Immediately post-war, those were tumultuous times. Perhaps Sir William thought he was getting a bargain as the old gentry faded away; little did he know that the Great Depression was on the horizon and ship-building, with the world market suddenly flooded with wartime ships, was going to be especially hard hit. In 1900, he'd employed 3,000 men and had 11 slipways; for much of the 1920s, his yard was barely making a ship a year, and for much of the 1930s, it was shut.

Sir William himself died in 1924, and the hall is still owned by his family. In the 1970s, his grandson's widow, Rosemarie, converted it into a fishing school for ladies, and for five years from 2005 it featured in the ITV reality series, From Ladette to Lady. It is now a private house, although the old coaching house is a lovely cafe, there's an extensive nursery in the old walled garden and there's an intriguing walk through a ruined chapel.

The sale, on May 6, 1919, at the King's Head Hotel in Darlington, raised £86,000 – about £4m in today's values.

If you have any information about any of today's interesting looking buildings and fantastically named places, please email chris.lloyd@nne.co.uk.