Holmside is located halfway between Burnhope (near Lanchester) and Edmonsley (near Sacriston) and consists of three distinct sites that are all called Holmside.

Nearest to Burnhope is Little Holmside Hall, the most westerly of the three Holmsides and a building of architectural significance. Holmside's early history is however centred on Holmside Hall, half a mile north east towards the former mining village of Craghead. Both halls are Grade 2 listed buildings and are private properties.

Holm often describes land surrounded by water and although feeders for several little streams surround Homside Hall, it is first recorded in the Boldon Book of 1183 as Holneset. This is thought to mean Holly fold or stable and may be associated with Holm Oak. These particular oaks have holly-like leaves. Early Lords of Holmside took the surname Holmeside, but the family seem to have died out. By the late 1300s Holmside belonged to the Umfravilles, a powerful northern family of Norman origin who may have built the hall. It was built as a defended manor, a fact betrayed by the slight remains of a medieval moat.

The moat surrounded the whole collection of buildings including a chapel that once stood nearby. The hall was perhaps built around a courtyard but underwent many alterations in the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Unfortunately little of medieval origin remains today.

Holmside hall passed through marriage from the Umfravilles to the Tempest family, but was seized from the Tempests after 1569, following their involvement in a Catholic rising. Queen Elizabeth gave Holmside to Sir Henry Gate in 1573, but he was only the tenant of the new owner, the Manor of East Greenwich.

In 1595 the property passed to Henry Jackman and then to Sir Timothy Whittingham in 1613. The estate was divided up during ownership by Sir Timothy's grandson, who was also called Timothy and the division resulted in the building of Little Holmside Hall in the later 1600s.

The older hall passed to the Spearmans and as a result of a Spearman marriage became the property of Thomas Wilkinson of Witton Castle who owned it in the early nineteenth century.

Little Holmside Hall, built around 1668, was initially the property of John Hunter of the Hermitage. It was described in the 1950s as "one of County Durham's best small country houses", by the architectural historian Nikolaus Pevsner but Pevsner also commented on the building's pitiful state of decay.

Fortunately a local solicitor acquired the hall in the late 1980s and received a Durham County Council Environment Award for what was described as a heroic restoration of the property.

Eastward from the two halls on the way towards Edmondsley we find the pretty little village of Holmside nestling in a tiny valley formed by the Wardles Burn.

The village developed in the late nineteenth century and was inhabited mostly by coal miners who worked at neighbouring collieries like Craghead, Edmondsley and Sacriston. In fact the mine at Craghead, was often called Holmside Colliery.

There is no church in the village because Holmside's parish church, built in 1869 is actually situated in the village of Burnhope two miles to the west. An inconvenience perhaps, but before this time Holmside was part of the parish of Lanchester and people made a much longer journey to make.

There was once however a school at the northern edge of Holmside village from 1844 but this unfortunately closed before the end of the nineteenth century. Nevertheless, despite the distant church and lack of school, Holmside saw some further growth in the early twentieth century. It is still nevertheless a very small place by Durham village standards.

Holmside village did not come into being until the late nineteenth century, but the southern part of the village encompasses an earlier hamlet called Warland Green. It was first mentioned under the name Warlandes back in 1311 and the medieval name means taxable land, belonging to a villein or feudal tenant.

Warland Green was already well-developed by the 1850s when its buildings clustered around the Wardles Bridge Inn, a pub that still exists today. Wardle probably comes from the name of the Wardel family who owned nearby Edmondsley in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. West Edmondsley Cottage and West Edmondsley Farm form part of the Warland hamlet.

The Eller Burn and Whiteside Burn streams meet at Warland where they become the Wardles Burn, but within half a mile east this stream becomes the Cong Burn after further streams feed it from Holmside Hall and Wheatley Green.

Cong Burn is a historically important rivulet and joins the River Wear at Chester-le-Street. It most famously gave its name to Congangium, the Roman fort of Chester-le-Street.

Just north of Holmside is a house called Wheatley Green, that was part of a farm described by Surtees, the nineteenth century Durham historian as a village of neat tenements.

It is situated on Wheatley Green Burn, a tributary of the Cong.

Known as Whitley and Whetlay in earlier times, the manor was held by the Umfravilles in the 1300s, and later belonged to the Earls of Westmorland. In the early 1900s relatives of mine farmed here, but only a private house remains today.

A quarter of a mile north, the road from Wheatley Green joins the Edmondsley-Craghead road or Black House Lane as it is known. A Black House Inn is shown at this junction on the 1850s map and is now the Charlaw Inn.

A hamlet of houses called Blackhouse clusters around the inn but Blackhouse was also the name for a village of a hundred or so houses that stood in a field near Edmondsley a little further east.

Charlaw is of course the name of the fell lying south of Holmside. Its summit can be reached by car from Sacriston or Witton Gilbert.

More on Edmondsley and Blackhouse in next week's Durham Memories.

If you have Durham memories you would like to share with The Northern Echo, write to David Simpson, Durham Memories, The Northern Echo, Priestgate, Darlington, DL1 1NF. E-mail David.Simpson@nne.co.uk or telephone (01325) 505098.