CH1 Knowledge about heritage

Outcome CH1 

Knowledge about North Pennines cultural heritage is growing, and being made accessible in the ways people find most useful and engaging

Measures 

Select each measure to view the organisations and groups with an important role in making them happen.

Box 11 Case study: Dukesfield documents

This is a free web-based collection of transcripts of original records from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries. It emerged from the ‘Dukesfield Smelters and Carriers’ conservation and heritage project, run by the Friends of the North Pennines charity between 2013 and 2015, mainly funded by the then Heritage Lottery.

The project was centred on the remains of what was for about a century the largest lead smelting mill in Britain, constructed in the mid-1660s by William Blackett at Dukesfield, three miles south of Hexham. To complement the fieldwork, hundreds of letters from eighteenth-century agents running this vast North Pennines lead business were transcribed by more than thirty people to support future research.

Instead of winding up when the project came to an end the group decided to continue transcribing - and as of March 2025, the contents of over 14,500 primary documents, loosely centred on the wider North Pennines lead industry, and comprising over 3.7 million words of searchable content, are available in Dukesfield Documents to researchers everywhere. The website attracts around 20,000 page views each year, including from the NPNL's own Land of Lead and Silver project team and volunteers.

In future the collection will additionally be made available through the North Pennines Virtual Museum, and thereby potentially introduced as a deep learning resource to new generations of people interested in the region's cultural heritage.

Box 12 Case study: Altogether Archaeology

Altogether Archaeology, the community archaeology group for the North Pennines, has carried out many archaeological excavations and surveys since it was set up in 2010 as a project of the National Landscape team, more recently operating as a volunteer-led charity.

From its inception, it has aimed to make all its work freely available to all those interested in the heritage of the North Pennines: excavations welcome visitors, public lectures publicise the findings, and excavations and surveys are always written up. The resulting reports are comprehensive but well-illustrated and intended to be understandable by the non-specialist. Annual interim reports are produced in the case of multi-year projects.

All its reports are downloadable from its website, altogetherarchaeology.org, which is accessible by non-members as well as members, and they are also sent to the relevant county archaeology service to be included in the county Historic Environment Record (HER).

Now that both Durham and Northumberland have completed the integration of Historic England’s records into their county HERs, the HERs are a comprehensive source of information on the heritage of the area. Access to them is publicly available through heritagegateway.org.uk and (for Durham and Northumberland)

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