Beamish's newest exhibit surrenders its surprising secrets

In that time, it has been slowly surrendering its secrets – like why a cannonball was hidden among its walls and why a corner of County Durham bears the name of an Iberian country.

Above: Spain's Field as it looked in 2016 abandoned in Weardale

Below: Spain's Field this week after its rebuild at Beamish, with Sally Dixon, Assistant Director of Partnerships and Communications at the museum, Rhiannon Hiles, the musem chief executive, Yvonne Forster whose family lived in Spain's Field until 1957, and David Gray, chairman of the Sir Tom Cowie Charitable Trust 

Spain’s Field Farm is officially opened to the public today as part of the museum’s £20m 1950s development. It was a small hill farm high on the northern side of the dale, between Stanhope and Eastgate. It was worked for three generations by the Raine family until 1957 when it was abandoned as it became too small to be viable for modern farming methods.

But its history goes back much further than the 1950s.

“The first documentary mention of it is in Bishop Thomas Hatfield’s survey of 1377 to 1380,” says Shannon Turner-Riley, the Remaking Beamish Design and Collections Officer, “when it was called Spaynesfold.”

“Fold” is an Old English word for an enclosure or pastureland and “spean” is a Weardale dialect word meaning “to wean”, so this was once a field where young animals were kept.

“There’s not definitive spelling of it,” says Shannon. “It appears six or seven times in censuses in the 19th Century, and each time it is different.”

In the 14th Century, when the temperature in Weardale was probably a few degrees warmer than it is now, it was a timber building. In the 17th Century, the timber was replaced by more substantial stones, some of which were stolen from elsewhere – in the byre, there’s a grand old doorway that has been taken from a tumbledown nearby castle or bastle (a fortified farmhouse).

The byre with a big door that was stolen, or repurposed, from another property somewhere in the dale

The byre had other secrets.

“In the infill of the wall we found a civil war cannonball from the 17th Century and some bottles which appear to have been purposefully put there,” says Shannon. “It is wrong to put words into the mouths of people who are long gone but there are lots of examples of this in earlier times as a way of warding off evil spirits.”

No one knows where the Spain’s Field farmers acquired their cannonball as we don’t think there were civil war skirmishes in Weardale.

Other outbuildings have stories to tell as well. One is known as a “ham and egg” house, or a “poultiggery”. Poultiggeries were surprisingly common from Northumberland to Shropshire: the pigs lived below and the hens above – the Spain’s Field poultiggery features a spiral staircase within the wall for the hens to climb to make it to bed.

The warmth from the downstairs pigs kept the hens warm – and safe. It was believed that the pigs’ presence kept foxes away.

The range in the kitchen, behind which was found a Georgian bread oven

The main farmhouse was found to have some secrets, too. The kitchen had a mid-Victorian cast iron range in it, made by Altham of Penrith, which suggests that in those days, Weardale’s main trading links were over the top of the Pennines into Cumbria rather than down the dale into Durham.

When the range was removed, the remains of a Georgian bread oven were revealed. Once every town, village and farmhouse in the Durham dales had a beehive-shaped bread oven which usually jutted out of the side of the property to make a distinctive, rounded shape.

A first floor bread oven in Island House, St John's Chapel in Weardale, from Christine Ruskin's book. All bread ovens had this distinctive rouonded shape sticking out from the walls. This one is on an extremely old property in which the farm animals were kept downstairs and the humans lived upstairs where they did their baking

The ovens were made of clay and stone with a bakestone – an indestructible piece of sandstone – at their heart. The fire was set for one-and-a-half hours raising the temperature to 200-plus degrees. Then the ashes were raked out and the dough was paddled in to bake for an hour.

The oven slowly cooled, and over the succeeding hours pies and cakes were baked followed by fancies such as macaroons and meringues.

In her 2018 book, The Disappearing Mills and Bread Ovens of Weardale, Christine Ruskin records the sites of at least 50 bread ovens in the dale, although it is believed only one – in a farmhouse near Wolsingham – survives (it would be fabulous to learn if there are anymore).

In the 1950s Spain's Field kitchen

“In Weardale, a lot of families were subsistence farming while the male of the household was also a leadminer or a quarryman,” says Shannon. “At Spain’s Field, they had cows, sheep and turkeys and they were almost self-sustaining – they were not too poor.”

But lighting was by oil lamp as they had no electricity, and water was collected from a nearby stream which after it had passed the house flushed away whatever was deposited in the outside toilet. These primitive conditions in the 1950s, allied to changes in milk production regulations, meant people began moving away from the remote upland farms for better live chances, and so places like Spain’s Field fell empty.

Now all 1,170 tons of it have been rebuilt at Beamish as a record and reminder of rural dales life in the 1950s. Spain’s Field opens for the first time to the public at 1pm today.