YOU'LL remember where we left the gallant Gen Sir John Moore, being ... buried in Spain at dead of night, with his soldiers the earth turning, by the moon's misty light ... and, to muck about no further with the famous poem, "the lantern dimly burning".

Heroism, patriotism, literary pretension ... the piece last month had everything - except a local angle. Now, however, like long-awaited No 9 buses, two roll up once.

Or rather one of them gallops up: in the flamboyant shape of Lord Londonderry of our own Wynyard Park, who led cavalry in support of Moore's army as it retreated to Dunkirk-style deliverance at Corunna in January 1809.

And the other footslogs in, documented by an ancestor of more modest County Durham address, the weary - as we shall see - Cpl Alexander Rollo, who held that lantern as his comrades dug the commander-in-chief's grave with their bayonets.

Mr John Rollo, of Vane Road, Newton Aycliffe, is the four-greats grandson of the Royal Artilleryman whose role when "slowly and sadly we laid him down" is immortalised in the first verse of Charles Wolfe's battlefield elegy.

He has been to the Public Record Office for a copy of his Scottish ancestor's discharge papers. They were issued in July 1820 when, aged 44 and after 26 years' service, the corporal was demobbed at Woolwich and with his wife and most of their ten children returned by sea to his home village near Aberdeen.

"That in consequence of being worn out," it is recorded, "... he was placed upon the pension list at 1s 7d 8p," presumably a week.

Alexander, though, was not too weary that he could not survive until the age of 82, nor to prosper enough to leave a gold watch chain now owned by Mr Rollo, nor to sally forth again from Scotland. He was buried at Tynemouth Priory in 1856 and his headstone records his role at Moore's burial.

Gen Moore was later given a formal tomb. Exigencies of another war meant that Cpl Rollo also had a second burial, some 60 years on: after the Kaiser's bombardment of the North-East coast, the grave was among those moved back from the clifftop to allow gun emplacements to be built there, I learn from Mr Graham Galilee, of Post Cottage, Barningham, Richmond.

Mr Galilee also has family buried at the priory and that grave too was moved for the same reason. He remembers there was a Tommy Rollo at Tyneworth Haven in the 40s who would do odd jobs on yachts; there are other branches of the family, one of which, York-born John Rollo told me, keeps the corporal's Peninsular War medal.

AT Wynyard Park, the veritable palace whose six-columned Corinthian portico looks out on parkland between Sedgefield and Billingham, there are rather more grandiose reminders of the considerable part that Charles Stewart, later the 3rd Marquess of Londonderry, played in the Peninsular War against the French.

A "monument room" has the bloody battle of Badajoz commemorated in its marble floor and his many others battles depicted alongside regimental crests in the stained glass ceiling splendidly lit by natural light from above. Amid trees that overlook the lake in front of the house is an obelisk to the allies' commander in Spain and Portugal.

"Wellington" says the inscription. But it originally said more. "The friend of Londonderry" was removed after the Marquess, who had the column erected to mark a visit his old chief paid him in 1827, felt slighted by the latter's failure to include him in the government he formed later that year.

The Duke of Wellington, when foreign secretary in 1835, recommended him to be ambassador to Russia but the appointment came under fierce attack in Parliament and Londonderry withdrew his acceptance.

Wellington was reported as then writing "that he was not particularly partial to the man, nor ever had been, but that he was very fit for that post, was an excellent ambassador, procured more information and obtained more insight into the affairs of a foreign court than anybody ... and wrote the best account of a conversation, of any man he knew."

Some of the popular hostility towards Londonderry at that time was because of his outspoken opposition to reform and he was once dragged off his horse by a mob.

He was a brave man and talented in many ways. He successfully undertook many diplomatic missions especially at peace conferences after Waterloo and later as ambassador in Vienna.

At Eton he tried to save the young Lord Waldegrave from drowning; his regiment promoted him twice within days of his being commissioned at 16; he saw much action before he was 20, suffering a bullet wound to an eye during a cavalry action on the Rhine; and at 23, already MP for Derry, he became under-secretary for war.

A year later, in 1808, he was fighting in Portugal and Spain. His stirring exploits there during the next three years began with him taking 80 French prisoners in a surprise attack by his hussars and Sir John Moore singled him out for praise before Corunna. Handsome and dashing, he felt sidelined when, still in the Peninsula, he was given a staff post; he yearned for more action as a cavalry commander there.

Wellington, however, while acknowledging the man's ability in a reply to a letter from the Duke of York, added that owing to his defective sight and hearing his gallantry might lead him into difficulties.

Those disabilities were probably exaggerated by Wellington. Neither they, nor a serious wound while fighting alongside Blcher in Germany in 1813, stopped him duelling to settle two apparently absurd later quarrels.

In each case, Londonderry is said to have "received his adversary's fire and then discharged his own pistol in the air".

NOW, a man with that sort of panache deserves to live in some style, I say. And Wynyard Park, which he built at massive cost after pulling down most of an existing mansion owned by his second wife's family, certainly provides that style.

It was struggling a bit when in 1987 the 9th Marquess sold it to Sir John Hall, who has spent some of his MetroCentre millions on grandly renovating it just as thoroughly as he restored the pride of a crumbling Newcastle United.

The 3rd Marquess, although his title came from his Irish ancestry, also built up his fortune in the North-East, in his case largely from coal-mining and ancillary enterprises on the huge Durham estates of the Vane family, whose heiress he married.

At the time of his death aged 75 in 1854 he was worth some £75,000 a year, worth at least 100 times that figure today.

He built the town of Seaham and its harbour - to ship the coal from his 11 mines - and also owned lime quarries, two railways and a steamer. Two thousand men were in his employ and he could be short-tempered with any he felt had let him down.

After Wynyard was destroyed by fire in 1841, it was found that his business manager had neglected to renew the insurance. The house was rebuilt to the same plan.

It had come under Londonderry's stewardship in 1819 when, aged 41 and a widower, he married Frances Anne Vane-Tempest, a ward of Chancery less than half his age.

A condition of the marriage, which took place after a three-month court case which ended when her mother's objections were overruled by the Lord Chancellor, was that he should change his name to Vane.

He began his Wynyard project in 1822 and, because of the dilatoriness of architect Philip Wyatt, work continued well into the 1830s.

The finished result, though, galleried, domed, pillared, decorated and furnished on a scale which would leave today's Lord Chancellor in a state of slavering, wallpaper-stripping jealousy was - is - magnificent.

Charles William Vane-Tempest-Stewart is buried in his wife's family mausoleum at Long Newton, between Stockton and Darlington, where a long inscription in marble mentions schools churches and a hospital given to Seaham.

His likeness is the verdigris-coated man, lord lieutenant of the county, astride the too-small horse in Durham market place.