Lost hall that was the scene of the most unhappy honeymoon of all time

It was where Lord Byron, who would rather have been in bed with his own half-sister, spent his "treaclemoon" with his bride, Annabella Milbanke, of Seaham Hall.

In 1812, his poem called Childe Harold's Pilgrimage propelled Lord George Gordon Byron to Top Of The Pops-style fame. He was "mad, bad and dangerous to know", having tempestuous affairs all over town, with women, with men, and even with his half-sister, Augusta.

When she fell pregnant, disgraceful scandal seemed inevitable. With money problems as well, Byron concluded that he needed saving. He turned to Annabella, one of his fans, in Seaham.

She was "prim and pretty" and, because she studied his maths, he called her his "princess of parallelograms". She was removed from the dissolute lifestyle of London and with a £20,000 inheritance awaiting her, could be the salvation of his soul and of his bank account.

He proposed marriage; she accepted with indecent haste; he immediately had regrets.

During the winter of 1814, he trudged slowly northwards to meet his destiny at the altar. She wanted a grand county wedding; he insisted on a small private affair.

On January 2, 1815, they were married before a family gathering at Seaham Hall, and left at once to honeymoon at her family's country seat of Halnaby, near Croft-on-Tees.

As they bounced across the frozen snow, Byron's mood became blacker and blacker. The bells of Durham Cathedral rang out for them, and Byron broke his bleak silence by shouting a wild Albanian chant.

They stretched their legs at Rushyford, but the jolting of the carriage over Darlington's cobbles made Byron moodier still. When, after 40 miles, they reached Halnaby, he leapt cold and stiff from the carriage - leaving Annabella in her finery to fend for herself.

Her wedding ring was too large, so she wrapped some black material around her finger to make it stay.

Superstitious Byron spotted it and shrieked: "Black ribbon!" He forced her to remove it. Then they had sex.

According to a letter, he "had Lady Byron on the sofa before dinner" - a perfunctory way to describe the loss of poor Annabella's virginity. They dined and drank and fell into a troubled sleep. In Byron's dreams, with the fire glowing red around him, Halnaby became Hell.

Because he was so embarrassed by his deformed foot, it is not certain whether he allowed Annabella to share the marital bed. He didn't arise from it until noon next day, by which time she was downstairs in tears.

"It is too late now, " he told her unsympathetically. "It is done and cannot be undone."

The treaclemoon lasted three weeks. His depression deepened. He frightened her with terrible half-truthful tales of his sodomy, incest and murder. On one occasion, he stood over her with a knife, daring himself to plunge it into her white neck while she read.

Yet, when his black moods lifted, Halnaby was the scene of tender moments. "I don't dislike this place, " he wrote to a friend. "It is just the spot for a Moon."

He affectionately called Annabella "Pippin" because her cheeks reminded him of apples. She heroically saved him from suffocating amid carbon fumes when he threw a bucket of water over the fire.

Together, they worked on his Hebrew Melodies - lyrics on Biblical themes that were to be set to music by Isaac Nathan (in those three weeks at Halnaby, he wrote and she copied out By the Rivers of Babylon We Sat Down and Wept, Herod's Lament for Mariamne and On the Day of the Destruction of Jerusalem by Titus).

On January 22, 1815, the treaclemoon was over. The nearly-happy couple returned to Seaham, and thence to Byron's half-sister's house near Newmarket, where the poet cruelly paraded Annabella in front of the woman with whom he had had an incestuous affair. It was downhill from there.

By November, Annabella was eight months pregnant, the bailiffs were at the door of their house in Piccadilly, Byron was drinking heavily, having an affair with an actress and sleeping with a loaded pistol in the bedroom.

The baby, Ada Augusta, was born on December 10. Three hours earlier, Byron had told his wife he hoped she and the child would die in labour.

On January 15, 1816, Annabella left for Seaham with her child. Neither saw Byron again. He fled scandal and debts for Venice and eventually died fighting for the romantic cause of Greek independence at the Battle of Missolonghi, in 1824.

Annabella, the princess of parallelograms, became interested in social, feminist and religious work. She remained a widow until her death in London in 1860. She had steered Ada, her daughter, away from literature and the arts for fear that they may awaken the destructive genes of her father. Ada worked with Charles Babbage on clockwork computers (in 1970, the computer language ADA was named in her honour), which suggests she had inherited her mother's mathematical mind.

However, Ada also amassed a huge gambling debt and died of cancer when only 36 - the same age as her father. She was estranged from her mother at the time, which suggests that Annabella was not the easiest person to live with - particularly if you were a dissolute, debt-ridden, free-spirited romantic poet on treaclemoon.

But Halnaby itself was built by Sir Mark Milbanke, lord mayor of Newcastle, in 1661.

"The local pronunciation always left the 'l' in Halnaby silent so it was "Harnaby"," says Ian Hillary. "That might be dying out now, just as Neasham has changed. Twenty five years ago, the old biddies on the bus used to say "Neesam" for the village."

The last resident of Halnaby was Lady Catherine James Crawford Wilson-Todd who died in 1948.

Audrey Chapman, of Dalton, very kindly sends us the sale catalogue from April 1949 when, over four days, all of Lady Catherine's possessions were sold off.

Audrey's parents, who lived at North Walmire Farm, were present in hope of buying a souvenir, and wrote down the price of the items as the hammer fell.

And so we know that in bedroom number four, known as "Lord Byron's room", the 5ft 6in mahogany poster bed with canopy top, silk damask draperies and a spring mattress with hair and wool overlay, sold for £25. Perhaps it was the one that the romantic poet slept in after scandal had forced him to marry Annabel Milbanke.

The most expensive lot in the sale was No 1,523, a 1938 Lanchester 14 four-seater saloon motor car, Reg No ETV 68, which sold for £425 – an amazing price as it had probably cost £50 less when it was new ten years earlier.

Sadly, not even the National Trust could be persuaded to take on the mansion, and so it was demolished in 1952. Its outbuildings remain, and a sundial from its grounds – reputedly designed by Inigo Jones – was presented to the rose garden in Darlington’s South Park, and a ceiling from it may have been salvaged and is now in Wycliffe Hall, near Barnard Castle. Can this be true?