Thorpe Thewles Village

Thorpe Thewles is a village that lies just off the A177 road between Stockton-on-Tees and Sedgefield in the Tees Valley. The village of Thorpe Thewles is currently made up of 182 households and a total population of 477 people of which: -

96 people (20%) are childred aged 0-15
313 people (66%) are adults of working age
68 people (14%) are adults that have retired

Thorpe Thewles has two public houses called the Vane Arms and the Hamilton Russell, a playing area, a church dedicated to Saint James and a community hall called Grindon Parish Hall.

The Post Office was closed in July 2008 and since this time Thorpe Thewles has been without a local shop.

Thorpe Thewles History

Thorpe Thewles has a rich and colourful history that can be traced back over Millennia.

The village as we know it today was settled in the 17th century and the church was built in 1887, however we can go further back in time to the 1st century AD when there was a substantial Iron Age Settlement!

Much of the information below has come from the efforts of Thorpe Thewles History Group as well as the efforts of Tees Valley Archaeology.

Iron Age Settlement

Between 1980 and 1982 a series of excavations were carried out in Thorpe Thewles, revealing a Mid Iron Age settlement from the 1st century AD. The excavation of the site was the biggest undertaken of it's kind in the North East of England and produced one of the largest collections of finds in England.

Tees Archaeology has the following to say about Thorpe Thewles Iron Age Settlement

"...it is situated on the east side of the A177, approximately 1.5 kilometres to the north of the village of Thorpe Thewles, near Stockton On Tees in the north-east of England.

Identifying the Iron Age Settlement

The site was first identified from an aerial photograph taken in 1976 by Leslie Still. The rectangular cropmark lies, significantly, on the same alignment as the modern road (the A177), which is in turn, reputed to follow the course of a Roman road between Stockton on Tees and Chester le Street. It is possible that the Roman road itself followed the course of an earlier trackway which was contemporary with the Iron Age site at Thorpe Thewles. Enclosures of this type are relatively common in the north-east of England but Thorpe Thewles is much larger than most, covering an area of almost 7,000 square metres.

Excavating the Iron Age Settlement

Between 1980 and 1982 Cleveland County Archaeology Section excavated over 50% of the enclosure. The ditch forming the enclosure was over 3 metres wide and 2 metres deep and the considerable upcast had been used to form a bank, probably on the inside. The bank would have been capped with either a stout wooden fence or a thick set hedge to protect the community’s livestock from bad weather and marauding wolves, wild boars and brown bears, then still native to the north of England. The entrance was at the southern edge."

Medieval Thorpe Thewles

In the Medieval period, Thorpe Thewles was one of a group of settlements in and around the parish of Grindon. However, none of these dwellings has survived except for the ruins of the little Norman church dedicated to St Thomas a Becket that is now located on private land.

This must have been an important church in the twelth century as it was consecreted by the Great Grandson of William the Conqueror - Hugh de Puiset, Bishop of Durham (1153-1193) sometime after the death of St Thomas a Becket in 1172.

Thorpe Thewles Famous Viaduct

One of the most famous landmarks in the North-East in recent memory was the Thorpe Thewles viaduct that crossed the small Bishopton Beck to carry the Castle Eden line Railway.

The Castle Eden Branch line of the North Eastern Railyway (NER) for Thorpe Thewles was constructed in the mid-1870's to ease congestion on other parts of the Railway. The watchwords at the time were "coal from pit to port - as much as possible and as quickly as possible" and the Castle Eden Branch would assist this by taking coal to Middlesbrough's growing Iron Industry in ever greater quantities

Thomas Nelson and Thorpe Thewles Viaduct

The construction of the viaduct was started in 1875 by Thomas Nelson who built an uninterrupted 20 span section along with a smaller 3 span section to cross Thorpe Valley Beck. The viaduct was an impressive structure, with each span being 60 feet in length and the whole structure used over eight million bricks!

Why a Viaduct?

When construction was complete in 1878, the viaduct had cost a total of £37,000 to build over three years. But was a viaduct really needed? Obviously something was needed to deal with Thorpe Valley Beck but there was a practice of filling in such valley's with mud and earth. Thw water could still continue with piping and tunnels. Why wasn't this done here? The answer is undertain at the time of writing, but it is thought that there was not enough landfill from the contruction of the rest of the branchline to fill in the beck, and it was actually cheaper to build a massive 23 arch viaduct than it would have been to dump a lot of earth into the beck!

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