I RECALL when attending one of your talks that you mentioned originating from Chester-le-Street, so you may be able to help. In the early 19th Century in the vicinity of Bournmoor (Burnmoor) between Chester-le-Street and Penshaw there was a coal mining settlement called Wapping. Can you suggest how it acquired its name. When did it disappear and are there any traces left? Secondly, in 1779 my ancestor, a pitman, lived at Pelton Fell. I understand that Pelton Colliery was not sunk until the early 1800s, at which other colliery may he have worked? - Ray Barrass, St Helen Auckland.

I ACTUALLY come from Durham City and my connection with Chester-le-Street was quite brief - I lived for a few months as a baby in Chester-le-Street Railway Station House. The station was my parents' home.

One of the best places to start searching for this kind of information is the Durham Record, an easy to use touch screen system available in the public library at Durham City and Darlington. You can touch any location on a map of Durham County and view comparable detailed maps for 1860, 1898, 1923 and modern times. Wapping appears as a place on the 1860 map but not the others. It seems to be the original name for Bournmoor, although Bournmoor was the name for the parish and for a farm (Burnmoor) further to the east near Fence Houses. The northern part of Bournmoor, on the A183 Chester Road was Wapping and there was a school here called Wapping School. Wapping village had been renamed Bournmoor by 1898 and only began to expand in the later 20th Century. Wapping is near the southern edge of Lambton Park close to the site of a garden centre. I am unable to offer an explanation for the name Wapping. It sounds like it could be a very old name going back to Anglo-Saxon times, but it could just as easily be a colliery name invented in the 18th or early 19th Century.

As far as your query relating to Pelton Fell is concerned, there was much mining activity in the Chester-le-Street area in the 18th Century. The area was suited to mining because it was not far from the navigable stretches of the River Wear to which it was connected by waggonway railways. A significant number of old coal shafts are shown along the Twizell Burn valley suggesting that there had been intense mining activity in this area.

THANK you to Mr Longstaff of Margrove Park, for phoning to tell me that North Ormesby was called Doggy simply because of the smell from industrial pollution for which the town was once known. Mr Longstaff, who once lived at North Ormesby, describes the smell as being like a wet dog sitting in front of a coal fire. He attributes the smell to a number of industries in the area, but most notably Shellenborg's Glue Factory. Here they once boiled down horses' hooves to make the glue. Old metal was melted down at a neighbouring factory to make ingots and this process added to the smell. Mr Longstaff claims that North Ormesby had no more dogs than any other part of Teesside and so disputes the idea that is named from the number of dogs that roamed here.