AS always inclined towards the fanciful, last week’s report from Hallam FC – the world’s oldest football ground – wondered if they or the legendarily hilly Tow Law Town had the more vertiginous pitch.

It was picked up via my blog – of which more shortly – by Dan Harden on the Kansas prairie (where things, it may be supposed, are a little more on the level).

Dan’s an engineer and surveyor. What was the Hallam gradient, he asked, to which the ultimately lucky guess was 1-in-30.

Several thousand miles and a few keyboard strokes away, Dan tried his skills on Google Earth. It proves to be exactly 1-in-30, the sort of incline for which steam locomotives were given a banking engine but which footballers are expected to ascend with just a kick up the backside.

So what of the fabled Ironworks Road ground at Tow Law? Dan comes back down to Google Earth. “It’s certainly a warped surface,” he reports, or what County Durham folk might call hilly-howly.

Goal line to goal line down the middle of the field is just 1-in-60 – but that’s where things start to get unduly undulating.

Corner flag to corner flag at the bottom end is again 1-in-30, but from the north-east corner to the halfway line is 1.5-in-30. “Mountainous,” says Dan and the slope across the halfway line is 1.4-in-30.

Ironworks attendees may be unsurprised to learn, however, that the slope along the Ironworks Road goal line is 1.57-in-30. A corner kick from the south-west corner is aiming at a goal which is 7ft higher and a corner from the other side aiming at a goal which is 4ft lower.

“The poor lad playing left back defending the Ironworks Road end literally has an uphill battle to fight,” says Dan. Tow Law may never have seen a harder shift, indeed, since Inkerman Colliery sank to its knees, exhausted, in 1886.

Dan himself was a left back in his youth. “Perhaps happily,” he says, “I never encountered anything quite like that.”

SO the plan on Saturday was to head up to Tow Law, take a breather with the left back, ascertain (as it were) the lie of the land.

The cold reality was that the match against Billingham Town was postponed, frozen pitch. The alternative was Durham City against Ryton and Crawcrook Albion at Consett, itself not noted for being sub-tropical.

“Snowed like hell here yesterday,” says one of the Consett lads, and quite likely to snow again after nightfall.

Between the wars City were in the old Third Division (North). Now they’re in the Ebac Northern League second division, homeless for Christmas and with no immediate prospect of a return within the city limits.

Vice-chairman Amadou Diallo reckons they’ve never played better since slicing the team budget. Club chairman Olivier Bernard – 108 games for Newcastle United, 10 on loan at Darlington – is absent, recovering from a replacement operation on the troublesome hip which almost 10 years ago ended his career. Word is that they’ll then look at the other hip.

Ollie Bernard is 37. It’s what’s called an occupational hazard.

THE aforementioned blog, warmly if somewhat partially recommended – www.mikeamosblog.wordpress.com – has been metaphorically quaffing at pubs named after forgotten trades, beginning at the Trimmers Arms in South Shields and overflowing as far as the Slubbers, in Huddersfield.

It prompted a blog reader to recall an infamous incident in Durham in 2011 when a morris dancing side called Slubbing Billy – in the West Riding a slubbing billy was a textile machine – had been working up a thirst around the city.

Expectantly, they jingle-jangled their way into the Swan and Three Cygnets – and were at once shown the door again.

The Swan is a Sam Smith’s pub, where across the estate there’s a ban on all forms of electronic entertainment and, presumably by extension, music.

Morris major, the story made the nationals. Sam’s, as is their wont, declined to comment. The column now learns, however, that the company has received an international award for its stance. It is, of course, the No Bells Peace Prize.

THE report from Hallam had been of the FA Vase tie with Morpeth Town. The previous stop on the Railroad to Wembley, Litherland v Shildon, prompted David Walsh to a welcome but somewhat improbable digression on the poet Siegfried Sassoon.

Litherland’s on Merseyside, about five miles from Liverpool. The ground, says David, was formerly part of a huge World War One barracks – Sassoon’s memoirs called it Clitherland – his base when “in wilful defiance of military authority” he published a statement in 1917 condemning the conduct of the war.

He was a second lieutenant, so recklessly brave that his men called him Mad Jack, awarded the Military Cross in 1916 and recommended, unsuccessfully, for the VC.

The statement changed all that. The MC ribbon went floating off down the Mersey and Sassoon was sent to a mental hospital near Edinburgh. Officially he was being treated for shell shock; his memoirs called it Dottyville, anyway.

FULL circle, a splendid book called Beyond the Turnstiles arrives with a thump. Basically it’s photographs – fantastic photographs – of football grounds and football folk across Britain and Europe, with a few short essays from invited contributors.

One’s on the theme of Identity. “Not even its own mother would call Tow Law strategically important,” it begins, “or for that matter beautiful, either.”

OK, the author’s pretty close to home….

Leon Gladwell, the photographer, read fine arts at Newcastle University – “I chose Newcastle for the Northern League” – and has since done everything from antiques dealing to running a cattery.

Another coincidence, he himself was headed to Tow Law last Saturday, discovered the match off but took a couple of photographs anyway, headed down past Stanley United (RIP) to Willington. “Some images for book two,” he says.

He takes a fabulous photograph, a man with so fine an eye for an angle that Steve Davis might seem off cue by comparison.

The book embraces images from Falmouth to the Faroe Islands, Abingdon to Ynys Mon, Snetteringham Maroons to Penmaenmawr Phoenix. “The accidental beauty of football architecture,” someone calls it.

“Identity” recalls the story, familiar hereabouts, of the FA Vase semi-final second leg match between Tow Law and Taunton Town in 1998, when a defeated Taunton fan headed home with a toilet brush with TLTFC engraved on the handle, having first sought permission to clean them out.

“Up in the North-East,” it says, “we don’t say that someone ‘comes from’ Tow Law, or Stanley, or wherever. We say that they ‘belong’ to Tow Law. Identity is belonging.”

Crook Town features, as does the now-fabled queue of bus shelters at Ryton and Crawcrook Albion’s ground in the Tyne Valley. Request stop, we asked Leon for the image.

n Beyond the Turnstiles by Leon Gladwell is published by Ockley Books (www.ockleybooks.com) at £25. Hardback, 280 full colour pages, too big for the Christmas stocking but wonderfully presentable elsewhere.