Last updated at 12:30, Friday, 06 March 2009

COB End, a cottage in the tiny hamlet of Wellgill, near Nenthead on Alston Moor, had an unenviable claim to fame 150 or so years ago – it sat in the middle of the widow-making capital of Britain.

Rural haven: Cob End Cottage lay in the middle of a major lead mining district.

Victorian researchers were startled to find that adult men in this part of the North Pennines pegged out at a greater rate than in the UK’s most sewage-soused and smoke-logged cities.

The General Board of Health totted up the figures in 1858. “The men of Alston die in a much larger proportion than the men of Liverpool,” they noted with surprise.

“Thus a district remote from city influences, situated in the midst of a most salubrious district, loses a larger annual proportion of its adult male inhabitants from diseases of the chest than the unhealthiest city in the kingdom,” it added.

The number crunchers put these shock figures down to “the injurious nature of male occupation” in Alston.

The most exclusively lead-mining district in England paid for its industrial supremacy with a “larger proportion of widows than in any other place in the kingdom”.

From the summer of 1837 to the summer of 1841, 75 miners died in Alston parish at the average age of 45. These figures are for adult men only – they didn’t count any Alston boys, cut off before their prime.

The “miners’ complaint” was a form of dust disease. As they dug and blasted their way through the veins of ore underground, or crushed and washed the ore above-ground, they breathed in tiny shards of mineral which scratched the linings of their lungs.

After three or four years in the mines, a man would notice he was breathing more heavily when he walked home from work. He might start spitting black, or even blue. Any sniffle went straight to his chest and laid him low. Soon his scarred lungs turned tubercular, and his days were numbered.

In the hamlet of Wellgill, many men worked in the nearby mines of R. Hodgson & Co. – down the Nentsberry Haggs to the High-Raise-Sun-Vein, Wellgill Vein, and Nentsberry Green-Cross-Veins. Others found an above-ground but equally hazardous job in the Wellgill Smelter Works, extracting zinc.

All around Cob End and Wellgill can be found evidence to support the findings of the General Board of Health. Many households in the 1881 Census are headed by a bereaved woman.

Jane Armstrong was one such widow, living at Wellgill Dykeheads a few hundred yards north of Cob End. She earned a crust by dressmaking. Isabella Thompson was another. She farmed seven acres at Wellgill with help from her adult children.

With life on Alston Moor often fitting the classic definition of “nasty, brutish and short”, it is no surprise that many pinned their hopes on the hereafter.

Tiny Wellgill had its own Quaker Meeting House as early as 1724. And on July 28, 1748, Methodism came to Alston Moor when John Wesley preached at Nenthead.

By the time Wesley paid a return visit to the area in May 1770 there were Methodist chapels at Alston and Garrigill, and plenty more were in the pipeline all around the Moor.

Nenthead was the venue for Methodist camp meetings which included hippy-sounding “love-feasts”. These events were low on flower power, nudity and pot but high on rapturous singing and preaching.

One such love-feast was described as “a great day of God. Two men came 20 miles to get sanctified. One of them caught the holy flame, and carried it to Middleton, and now it is spreading there.”

Nenthead’s first Methodist meeting place was the barn of a farmer called Matthew Latimer, at the foot of Dykeheads Road near Wellgill. In this suitably humble structure “marvels of grace were wrought and some of the greatest reprobates were savingly converted”.

But by 1825 the community of Nenthead had chipped in to build themselves a proper chapel, and claimed it to be the “highest place of worship in England”, at 1,800 feet above sea level.

By the late 1800s Nenthead and its environs held 2,000 souls, whose piety and learning were just as remarkable as their ore production.

In 1901 an inspector called Mr Forster visited every house in the district, so Cob End Cottage would have been on his list. He found everything “clean, whole and in its place” with no “trumpery ornaments” as he had spotted with disdain in the homes of families in coal-mining areas.

If a Nenthead miner had a picture on his wall it was of a religious evangelist. His books were the Bible and hymnals, with some improving poetry such as Cowper or Milton.

“I counted 19 copies of the Imperial Dictionary,” said Mr Forster. “There were no cheap periodicals or people’s editions – they are not reckoned at all canny.”

Mr Forster also noted that Nenthead’s children were above the average: “The remarkable personal beauty of the children, as compared with those of the adjoining colliery districts, is, I presume, to be attributed to nothing but their transmitted and reflected intelligence,” he wrote.

The medical researchers of the General Board of Health also noted that the children of Alston were generally healthier than the children of Liverpool – though they lost that advantage when they grew up and went down the mines.

Luckier locals could stick to agriculture, like some of the early 20th century residents of Cob End.

According to Kelly’s Directory, John Walton was a farmer at Cob End in 1906, and John P. Read farmed there in 1910.

l Cob End Cottage at Wellgill near Nenthead, is for sale via Red Hot Property of Old Church, Hexham.

First published at 09:48, Friday, 06 March 2009
Published by http://www.hexhamcourant.co.uk