Rockliffe Hall at Hurworth today celebrates its 10th anniversary of its opening as a hotel – but the human history of this entrancing loop of the River Tees goes back many centuries
4th Century
When the hotel golf course was built in 2007, evidence of a 4th Century agricultural settlement was found on the banks of the Tees. The prize find from the Roman era was the remains of a very fine dish that had been turned on a lathe and the inside tinned with copper alloy. Only one other such dish has been found in northern Europe, in Dresden, in Germany.
18th Century
The loop of the Tees is home to five farms. Hurworth Grange, which was where the football club training headquarters is today, was probably the oldest, its named suggesting it was connected to the 12th Century Neasham Abbey. Then there was Pilmore Farm and Pilmore House, and High Rawcliffe and Rawcliff – the name has nothing to do with rocky cliffs, and is more about raw, or unstable, riverbanks.
1829
Colonel Gordon Skelly, of Pilmore House, dies and is buried beside the porch of Hurworth church. The colonel was most renowned for leading the storming of the Indian capital of Seringapatam in 1799, after which he had settled at Pilmore, probably because his wife came from Ravensworth, North Yorkshire. Under him, Pilmore House became a comfortable villa – it is believed the cellars beneath the hotel are all that remain of his home.
1837
George Hutton Wilkinson, of Harperley Hall and chairman of the Great North of England Railway, cut the first sod at Pilmore on November 28 for the first stretch of the East Coast Main Line from Darlington to York.
The area was swamped with navvies digging cuttings, and Pilmore was effectively used as the builders’ yard.
It is believed that when the line was dug through a Roman fortification called Castle Hills on the west of Northallerton, a two sarcophaguses were found, one of which is still in the hotel grounds. On a visit in 1890, Rudyard Kipling is said to have been inspired by the sight of the sarcophagus to write one of his most famous poems, The Roman Centurion’s Song.
1844
The railway opened on June 18, crossing the Tees on a skew viaduct, which was an engineering marvel of the day. The viaduct still carries the mainline, and from it, passengers can see the football club’s training pitches.
1857
Head banker Alfred Backhouse rents Pilmore House. He had grown up in Sunderland, where his father, Edward, had made a fortune as the only banker in the city – Backhouse Park is Edward’s pleasuregardens.
Alfred had moved back to Darlington, and during the 1850s, lavished a fortune on the Greenbank mansion and estate, off Woodland Road. However, he and his wife Rachel, from the Barclay family, wanted somewhere more rural, and so they moved to Hurworth.
1861
Alfred’s father had died the previous year, leaving him a fortune which he spent buying up all the farmland in the Pilmore loop. Then he knocked down Col Skelly’s comfortable villa and employed an unknown Manchester architect Alfred Waterhouse to build him a fashionable mansion.
At the same time, Waterhouse was building Darlington’s iconic clocktower and covered market complex, and a stunning headquarters for Alfred’s bank on High Row, which is now occupied by Barclays. The success of these projects catapulted Waterhouse onto the national stage and he became the greatest Gothic architect of the Victorian era.
1864
The first phase of Pilmore is complete, at a cost of £14,335. It looks east towards the misty outline of the Cleveland Hills.
1873
Alfred embarks upon a second £15,000 phase of building, re-orientating the building so that it looks south across the extravagant parkland he has begun to lay-out. The new south face of his mansion has a more playful feel, with a long conservatory and curious effects like a minaret on the roofline.
It was complete by 1877, when Alfred ordered a third phase of building: he wanted a clocktower, like that in Darlington town centre, to crown his estate.
It never got built – although there does appear to be a space of it at the foot of the drive – perhaps because Alfred was so keen on developing his parkland into one of the finest in the north. He had a lake with a boathouse, a large heated walled garden, a rock garden, a croquet lawn, and long walks through specimen trees brought from all over the world.
He had a grand carriage drive through his grounds down to his private carriage bridge over the River Tees and, if all that wasn’t enough, he had another country retreat built by Waterhouse at Dryderdale in the wilds of Weardale.
1888
Alfred dies at Dryderdale of a heart attack, and his body is brought back to Hurworth for a long funeral procession into the Friends Meeting House in Darlington. He doesn’t have any children, although he adopted his nephew and built Hurworth Grange (now the community centre) for him as a wedding present.
1898
Rachel dies at Pilmore, triggering a five day sale of all the precious items she and Alfred have collected over a lifetime – 2,000 books, oil paintings, watercolours, antiques, and a whole day was devoted to the sale of the contents of the greenhouses.
The only item not sold was an extremely rare revolving marble statue by Giovanni Battista Lombardi of Rome showing the pharaoh’s daughter finding baby Moses in the bulrushes. The Backhouses were extremely private, but for decades they had been quietly donating money to Darlington’s hospital, and in death, they left the statue to the hospital which had been established in their old home of Greenbank.
Now the statue graces the entrance to the maternity ward at Darlington Memorial Hospital.
1911
Lord Southampton, a mad keen foxhunter, buys Pilmore due to its proximity to so many good hunts. He renames it Rockliffe, and he builds kennels close enough to the hall so he can hear his hounds “singing” when he lies in bed.
His son, Charles, had a thing for actresses appearing at Darlington Hippodrome – he would shimmy down Rockliffe’s drainpipes to secretly make their acquaintanceship. Lord Southampton, it is said, created Rockliffe cricket ground in front of the hall in an attempt to divert him from such behaviour and provide him with a more legitimate way of bowling a maiden over.
1944
Six airmen from the Croft airfield lose their lives when their Halifax bomber crashes into what is now a football training pitch on August 30. On March 4 the following year, another Halifax crashlands just 200 yards from the hall, without loss of life.
1948
Lord Southampton sells Rockliffe to the Hospitaller Order of St John of God, based at Scorton, and convert it into a long stay hospital for the mentally and physically handicapped, with an operating theatre in the hall. Brother George, in his black habit and thick-rimmed glasses, became a well known figure locally, collecting money.
In 1971, the monks built a chapel illuminated by stained glass windows by Alfred Fisher, the most celebrated master glass painter of his generation. Those windows now feature in the hotel’s swimming pool.
1991
With care in the community changing the way disabled people are treated, Rockliffe falls empty – even the five brothers buried in the grounds were exhumed and taken away. The brothers had the Pope’s blessing to convert the former hospital into a 100-bed hotel with a nine-hole golf course, and there was interest from a quarrying company which thought there was 25-years of gravel to be extracted.
1996
Steve Gibson is in search of training facilities for Middlesbrough FC. He buys the Rockliffe estate for £700,000, primarily for its flat land.
1999
The £7m training facility is opened on October 29 by Hurworth’s MP, Tony Blair, who is also Prime Minister. Attention then switches to the derelict hall next door…
2009
On November 23, the £55m five-star hotel is opened by Margaret Pratt and Dorothy Mounsey, the great-great-grand nieces of Alfred Backhouse, the banker whose money and vision had created the estate 150 years earlier – although human habitation in the entrancing loop of the river goes back much further than that.
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