Q: Please can you tell me when Leasingthorne, Chilton and Brussleton pits closed in the Durham coalfield? - Mary Firbank, Hilton Road, Bishop Auckland.

A: Leasingthorne Colliery, near Bishop Auckland, closed in March 1967 along with Thrislington. Chilton Colliery - part of Ferryhill's Dean and Chapter Colliery - closed in January 1966 and Brussleton closed in May 1968. A list of colliery closures from 1947 to 1994 can be found in The Collieries of Durham Volume 1 (1994) published by Trade Union Publishing Services Ltd in 1994.

Q: I was recently asked by a young Australian lady, who is a reporter with a local newspaper in Bristol, why County Durham is so named and recognised as a postal address? Other counties such as Cornwall, Devon, Norfolk and Hampshire do not have the designation county as part of the address. I suggested that it might have something to do with the City of Durham. - Mark Stephenson, Raby, Road, Durham.

A: The reason is partly to avoid confusion between the city and county of Durham and partly to do with history. Lots of English counties developed from medieval administrative regions called shires, each looked after by a shire-reeve or sheriff. Most shires took their name from a central administrative place often known as the county town. Thus Oxfordshire comes from Oxford, Northamptonshire comes from Northampton, etc.

This was the case with the vast majority of historic shires although some developed from ancient tribal areas or Anglo-Saxon kingdoms. Northumberland, for example derives its name from the ancient Kingdom of Northumbria, although it covers a much smaller geographical area. Other shires similarly named, include Sussex and Essex (once kingdoms of the South and East Saxons) or Norfolk and Suffolk (the North and South folk of the Kingdom of East Anglia). Cornwall and Devon take their name from earlier Celtic tribes, as did Cumberland and possibly Westmorland.

The County of Durham takes its name from the city of Durham but is generally known as County Durham and can sometimes appear in listings and indexes under C rather than D. County can be considered part of the name. In this respect it differs from the counties of Ireland - County Down for example - where the prefix county is a preferred style. The main reason we have County Durham and not Durhamshire is due to the Prince Bishops, who once ruled the area as a virtually separate state. Their realm was not a shire but the County Palatinate of Durham. Although Durham has not been a County Palatinate since 1832, when the last vestiges of the Prince Bishops' political powers were abolished. The County was not renamed Durhamshire, probably because the term shire really belonged to an earlier age. The name County Durham was a natural development from County Palatinate of Durham.

In Anglo-Saxon times the area was known as the Land of the Haliwerfolk, the holy-man's people's folk. In 995 the Haliwerfolk moved to a new place called Dunholm, or Dunelm as it was known in Latin. The county might have become Dunholmshire had the Normans not given the area special Palatinate status and renamed the place Duresme from which we get the present name Durham.

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Published: Monday, 21st May, 2001