The dark and tragic secret buried for three centuries beneath Hurworth Green

by Fay Nayman, Darlington & Stockton Times

[ This account is hung up in a picture frame just inside the door of the Bay Horse and is included here with their permission.]

Looking towards the village green at Hurworth life would appear to have always been idyllic.

But a dark secret lurking beneath thousands of tons of forgotten earth reveals that the village has had its fair share of misery. For far below the village green lie the remains of more than 1,000 souls who fell victim to the Great Plague in 1665. The bodies lay ten deep in three mass graves covered with a layer of lime to aid decomposition.

There is no marker and no plaque telling of the horror which almost wiped out the 750-strong village-leaving only 75 behind to mourn their dead. But if you look closely the evidence is plain to see.

Three huge dips in the village green map out the massive pits where the bodies were piled up one on top of another until the graves were full. As many as 1,500 people were believed to have been buried beneath the picturesque green according to records kept in the church until only a short time ago.

Bodies from other nearby villages were reported to have been ferried across the river Tees and brought to Knellgate-a narrow passageway- linking the river to the green, a bell was rung to warn villagers to go inside their homes. Then along the narrow village track came a lone grave digger with a cart laden with lime, filled at one of the huge storage pits housed in the appropriately named Limeyard next to the Bay Horse pub. He worked alone, placing the bodies into the newest pit before burying them in lime. Only once the pit was full was soil piled on the top and the grave closed.

The sandy soil underneath the green continues to move with topsoil falling into the spaces once occupied by corpses. The huge hollows remain a permanent memorial to this human tragedy.

Over the years, as the road between the green has been dug up to lay pipes and cables, workmen have literally come face to face with skulls and bones. Not knowing whether their gruesome find was the foul deed of some serial killer, the police were always called to the scene. “There seemed a time’ in the 70's when sirens in the village were almost a monthly occurrence,” recalled Coun. Peter Foster who has lived in the village for 46 years. “As the workmen dug deeper skeletons popped out of the ground to greet them. All of them thought they had uncovered a murder. But the vicar of All Saints church would rush out and explain everything to the police and then bury the bones back where they had come from.”

The secret past of the village was revealed to Coun. Foster when he asked the Rev Piper what lay in the giant safe in the vestry of the church. “When I was 15 years old I came to live at Skipbridge Farm near Neasham as part of a YMCA farm scheme. I lived with the Miller family for around 10 years working on the farm, with all the bacon I could eat.

As Mr Miller was a Methodist minister we all helped out at the church. Once when we were in the vestry, I asked Mr Piper what treasures lay in the safe and it was then that he told me about the bodies buried under the village green. I remember him opening the safe and taking out some very old parchment scrolls. They recounted the village’ s history right back to the 16th century and detailed the time the plague struck the village. The records were written in beautiful old English hand writing and clearly recalled the bodies arriving by Knell Gate, the lime pits in Lime yard next to the Bay Horse pub and the local farmers and tradesman who dug the three mass graves to bury the local victims.

At the beginning the writing was very neat but as the Rev Thomas Thompson himself was struck down, the writing became very shaky and hardly readable. Then one day it just tails off-as if he died writing.”

But it is not all doom and gloom. A village history written in 1900 by Edith Katherine Harper for her nephew Robert reveals Hurworth does have a lighter side.

Once a thriving industrial village filled with linen weavers, many of the original residents were related to each other, being born to only a handful of families. That could have been why old John Tiplady, known as “Jack Tip” was said to have been one of the village’s oddest residents. Keeping himself to himself and only seen out at the strangest times of day and night, he had a penchant for cleaning and tidying the village. He never spoke to anyone and nobody dared speak to him. The rows of weavers’ cottages are still visible today but only from the bridge across from the Otter and Fish pub.