Fragrant, informal and fun

It is verdant, fragrant, informal, informative and (most of all) fun. Where else a "walk through a compost heap" or a "virtual reality composting chair" in which visitors are invited to experience a journey to the heart of the compost heap?

Instructions: 1. Put the bucket over your head. 2. Sniff the funnel."

We couldn't embrace everything, but managed the scaled down Tees trail so comprehensively - Cow Green to Teesport in a quarter of a merry mile - that we stumbled into Cowpen March, or its miniature equivalent, and ended up to the oxters in clarts.

Over 100 ecologically agreeable attractions include bee garden and cider orchard, mazes, meadows and children's playground, even something labelled "Market garden and Northern Echo allotment" - though not, of course, in our backyard.

There was also something called the "Lacewing Hotel", a five-star haven for those four winged insects, if not quite so comfortable for greenfly.

Most fascinating of all, perhaps, was the apothecaries' garden, described as a "living pharmacy and green chemist's shop" and adorned with a relief of Pliny the Elder.

The elder Pliny was a First Century Roman who knew about such things, and just about everything else there was at the time to be known.

Feverfew is for headaches, it's said, coltsfoot for coughs, plantain and camfrey for wounds, St John's wort for depression - readers may care to submit their own natural cures - bugle for sores and ulcers and sweet violet (what else?) for purging the body of choleric humours.

A pint of beer, from time to time, has been known to have much the same effect. At Nature's World a pint was £1.20. It might have been the most environmentally friendly gesture of all.

l Nature's World, Ladgate Lane, Middlesbrough (01642) 594895. Open 10am-5pm (Sunday 6pm) until the end of September. Parties by arrangement. www.naturesworld.org.uk

PARKIN Raine, photographic detective, has called in the column to help solve his most baffling case. The pictures - "cracking" as correctly he observes - were clearly taken at Egglestone Abbey, near Barnard Castle. He guesses it was about the end of the First World War.

But what the military occasion, for whom the funeral or memorial service and why amid the ruins of Egglestone Abbey? Note also the narrowness of the coffin on which the dead man's cap and Union Flag are placed. Was it simply a memorial service, the coffin symbolic but otherwise empty?

Parkin, a retired BBC engineer and enthusiastic photographic historian, copied the photographs several years ago from a woman in Barnard Castle. Though his researches have included the Green Howards Museum in Richmond and the Roman Catholic diocese of Middlesbrough - Egglestone Abbey sits on the south bank of the Tees - he remains, like a Victorian photographer, in the dark.

"Some of the civilians in the small choir on the left are recognised as members of the Smith family who were stalwarts of the Roman Catholic congregation in Barnard Castle, but none to whom I have spoken can shed any light on the event. The soldiers look to be cadets, with a stiffening of mature troops. Perhaps someone may have the same photograph in their family album"

Parkin, who also lives in Barnard Castle, has thousands of photographs but none which more greatly intrigues him. "It would be wonderful if your readers could offer more information. You'd be my friend for life," he insists.

The John North Irregulars are no doubt on the case already.

THE Spennymoor Pub and Club Watch, to whose morning meeting we were invited last year, continues to be vigilant.

"Our aim is to make Spennymoor pub and club trade as secure, professional and profitable as possible," they say, and an extract from the minutes of the last meeting shows why they're needed.

One of the member pubs raised the case of a person who had been shouting and abusive to the staff. "He was asked to leave because a family funeral was taking place, was escorted to the door and put out.

"He then kicked the door in, caused damage to the door frame and was asked to leave several times. Eventually he returned with his pack of dogs and let them loose in the pub."

The young man in question has been banned from all member pubs for two years, subject to review thereafter. The same probably applies to his dogs.

LAST week's note on Wendy Bowker, the former prison officer and Darlington restaurant owner who now provides inside information for the Bad Girls television series, said that multiple killer Rose West had the "penthouse suite" in the women's wing at Durham jail. A serving officer there has called to deny it.

West, she says, is in a single cell like the other 40 women serving life in Durham but is treated no differently from anyone else. The Cromwell Street killer, adds the officer, is no longer any trouble. "I'd rather have Rose West than some of the other so-and-sos we have here. We have some who should be in a mental hospital who are far more difficult to deal with.

"Rose West gets a lot of stick. Her punishment is being in prison and she is further punished when she is in prison."

All 108 women on the wing are treated, says the officer, with humanity. "I wouldn't dare do otherwise."

....and finally, conversation in the pub the other night turned - as so often it does - to the Billy Cotton Band Show. In the radio version, insisted the Stokesley Stockbroker, the singer was a young lady called Doreen Stephens who not only came from Teesside but was known, even more improbably, as the Stockton Sparrow. Is it true, or simply a Wakey Wakey-up call? More next time, perhaps, on the little sparrow of Stockton.