Flooding – it's not a new problem as these 1960s Hurworth and Croft photos show

It wasn’t the Tees that did the damage. It remained within its banks – just. Instead it was the backed up Skerne, unable to break out into the larger watercourse, the spilled through and flooded the road, for the first time in a decade.

Fortunately, the living areas of the houses and cottages of Tees View are raised up, so although the water lapped at their brickwork, not much damage was done.

Unlike in 1881.

One of the cottages that was marooned by the floodwater on Sunday used to have a brick painted black up in its eaves showing where the 1881 flood reached.

The low cottage at Tees View, Hurworth Place, which used to have a brick which marked the highest ever level of the floodwaters in 1881. The black cross added to this photo shows the 1881 high water mark.

The low cottage, with the light burning in the door, after Storm Ciara had blown through.

1753, when all but one house in Neasham was destroyed, was a bad flood. November 1771, when a horse was found still alive but stuck in the top of a pear tree in Low Coniscliffe, was a once-in-a-century inundation.

But March 10, 1881, was probably the greatest flood since Noah built his arc.

It followed a long spell of snow – there were 20ft drifts at Barnard Castle and at Gainford they’d played cricket on the frozen river. Then it broke…

“Quondam purling streamlets had risen to turbulent torrents, choking and rushing along their narrow beds with terrific force,” said the Darlington & Stockton Times. “Small cascades had swollen to roaring miniature Niagaras; fields were flooded with melting snow and driving rain, roads were impassable, and from every ridge and hill the water came. Nature herself seemed to be dissolving…”

The 10-year-old footbridge at Thorngate in Barnard Castle was washed away, with two male spectators on it dragged to their watery deaths. Baydale Farm at Blackwell was completely submerged and all farmer Reid’s turnips were washed away, Alfred Backhouse’s carriagebridge at Rockliffe Hall was destroyed, Neasham was overwhelmed, and Yarm was turned into Venice.

But it was the Hurworth Place area that bore the brunt.

“Five feet of water collected on the land attached to the Nag’s Head – a height never before remembered while at Croft the inundations were at their worst,” said the D&S Times. The Nag’s Head is now a farm on a bend of the A167 between Darlington and Hurworth Place, but once it doubled as a roadside hostelry.

“By 12 o’clock, the water was on a level with the river wall and soon began to pour on to the road. The Skerne, being dammed back by the height of the Tees, flooded the land on each side to a great depth, making the whole landscape one sheet of water. Half a mile above the bridge the Tees overflowed its bank on the Yorkshire side, and taking round by Monk End, it rushed into the village with considerable speed, meeting the overflow from the Durham side.

“The water kept rising until 2.30 on Thursday morning. There was then no less than eight feet of water on the high road just below Mr Ness’ house, the flood reaching half way up the hill to the station and rushing across the low lying land on each side with terrible force.”

Mr Ness must have been Croft House, a recently demolished mansion that has been replaced by a handful of executive homes, so all the row of riverside properties up to the Comet must have had water into their upper floors. The cottage with the black brick had only its rooftiles above the waterline.

After a couple of hours, the flood began to recede, and by 10am when the D&S Times’ reporter reached the scene, the clean-up had begun. “The banks were strewed with wreckage – trees, hurdles, planks, sawdust (evidently filched from some wood yard), turnips (Mr Reid’s), bulbs, corn, hay, gates, a sheep trough and many other things,” he noted.

Among those many other things was the deck of a footbridge from Middleton-in-Teesdale that villagers turned into a riverside bench.

Let’s hope Storm Dennis this weekend doesn’t add to this sodden list.