Mike Amos

Community buy-out on the agenda for parish church

5:02am Wednesday 18th September 2019

PROPHESIED hereabouts in July, the folk of Witton Park now formally face losing their parish church – St Paul’s – but with an ingenious plan for its salvation.

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Mike Amos meets the man behind the revival of Shildon Carnival

5:00am Wednesday 11th September 2019

FOR medical reasons which need not now detain us, there wasn’t going to be a column this week. Then Paul Evans got in touch about matters close to – well, close to the bit of the anatomy which now diverts the docs. This very weekend, Paul’s resurrecting Shildon carnival.

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The Crook lad who joined the 1860s gold rush to Australia

10:30am Saturday 7th September 2019

It was just a passing reference, a throwaway line as they might almost say in the Crook and District Games League, whose annual presentation we reported a fortnight back.

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Mike Amos travels to a village flooded with community spirit

5:00am Thursday 29th August 2019

WHEN they told the new editor of the Reeth Gazette that the news would come to him they may not have imagined the awful, awe-ful events of Tuesday, July 30.

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Plenty to celebrate on a Saturday afternoon in Tow Law

5:00am Wednesday 14th August 2019

AS ever when blessed by Norman Deacon’s green fingers, the flower festival at St Philip and St James’ church in Tow Law proved a magnificent occasion. As with so many other churches, it was also good to be there and not be attending a funeral.

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Funding to save the bridge at Witton Park may have been identified

5:01am Wednesday 24th July 2019

IN the dear-gone days when public meetings helped formulate journalistic bread and butter, two words from the Bumper Book of Adjectives were considered indispensable. One was “packed”, the other “stormy”.

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Lions bookshop still doing a roaring trade

3:16pm Wednesday 3rd July 2019

A BOOKSHOP in which nothing costs more than 50p and where much represents an extraordinary bargain is marking 25 years at its present premises.

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Mike Amos: Something in the air

6:30pm Tuesday 11th June 2019

TORNADO, the Darlington dreadnought, has been enjoying life on the fast line. Tornado Telegraph tells of the 21st century steam engine galloping from Leicester to Holyhead, from North Road to Chester on a circuitous route via 49 junctions and of blasting at 62mph over the formidable Shap Summit in Cumbria, a heritage steam speed record.

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Scrambling club

5:00am Saturday 8th June 2019

AMID the glorious plains of Bishop Auckland Golf Club there’s a Texas scramble and shotgun start, appropriate because the day’s beneficiary is himself Texan.

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Swaledale: the squeeze

5:00am Wednesday 5th June 2019

GUNNERSIDE’S glorious, galleried Methodist church – now the only chapel in a dale which once had a dozen – may best be known for its services marking mid-summer and mid-winter days.

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'People are talking about moving out' over Witton Park bridge closure

5:10am Wednesday 29th May 2019

SALUTED worldwide, Witton Park was at the heart of the protracted, but ultimately successful battle against Category D, a Durham County Council “no development” policy which condemned 121 communities to a slow death.

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Pot luck

2:30pm Wednesday 15th May 2019

ATTENTIVE readers will know that these columns’ favourite word is serendipity, a five-syllable construction meaning jam.

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Mike Amos: Musical moments with some refreshing stops

5:00am Wednesday 8th May 2019

DANBY Wiske is one of four villages – Appleton, Kirby and Newby alphabetically the others – which take the second part of their name from the river which mooches through that part of north North Yorkshire.

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Inside stories

5:00am Wednesday 1st May 2019

WHEN it comes to Her Majesty’s prisons, this column’s not so much recidivist as damn-near institutionalised.

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Up at dawn, but always in time for breakfast

5:00am Wednesday 24th April 2019

IT’S 4.15am on the clock and 10 degrees on the thermometer when we leave home on a moonlit Easter morning. Somewhat surprisingly, it’s still ten degrees 75 minutes later, 2,000ft up on Middlehope Moor.

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Mike Amos joins the Barney army

12:00pm Wednesday 3rd April 2019

ON August 18 last year, we wrote of a two-man Edinburgh Fringe show – BBC Tees presenter Bob Fischer, 47, and 31-year-old Gateshead-based television producer Andrew Smith – in undiluted appreciation of Last of the Summer Wine.

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Mike Amos: Walking the walk - the column bids farewell to three friends

5:00am Wednesday 27th March 2019

DAVID CHARLESWORTH, a very good friend to these columns and to Chris Lloyd’s, has died. He was 66.

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Daley record

5:03am Saturday 23rd March 2019

ONCE voted the biggest waste of money in football history, and dining out on it pretty much ever since, Steve Daley pitched up the other evening at a sportsmen’s do at Tow Law Town.

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Buzzing over a restored Brooklands Mosquito

4:59am Wednesday 13th March 2019

FIFTY years and a day since aviation pioneer Ernie Brooks crashed to his death at Teesside Airport, a restored Brooklands Mosquito was again seen outside hangar number two on Sunday.

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