Aerial Echoes of the North

Aerial Echoes of the North Exploring, photographing and filming the North East’s valleys, viaducts, and industrial ghosts. Drone flyer. Industrial history nerd. Local geology wanderer.

Rediscovering the stories written in wind, stone, and forgotten places. I explore the landscapes that built our region and share the stories hidden in the stone.

Durham once had 14,000 of these. A handful still stand at Inkerman.The Weardale Iron and Coal Company opened Inkerman Co...
24/08/2026

Durham once had 14,000 of these. A handful still stand at Inkerman.

The Weardale Iron and Coal Company opened Inkerman Colliery in 1853, firing coke from 20 beehive ovens almost immediately and expanded to 50 by 1875. Named after a pub, itself renamed for the Battle of Inkerman, the colliery once employed over 300 men on a hillside north of Tow Law that had been empty moor a decade before. Seven ovens survive, domed brick slowly sinking back into the ground they came from.

Terris Novalis — a giant theodolite and engineer's level, twenty times life size, raised on cast animal feet — stands on...
23/08/2026

Terris Novalis — a giant theodolite and engineer's level, twenty times life size, raised on cast animal feet — stands on the site of Consett Steelworks, once Europe's largest. Sculpted by Turner Prize winner Tony Cragg and installed in 1996, it marks the ground where 150 years of iron and steel-making ended when the works closed in 1980. Cragg called it "new made land" — there was nothing left to measure by the time he arrived.

22/08/2026

The Wharnley Burn doesn't announce itself. It just keeps falling, the way it always has, a short walk from where the crowds park.

Tucked into the woods near Allensford Country Park, on a stream that slips quietly into the River Derwent, this little waterfall has been doing this since long before the ford that gave the place its name, first recorded as Aleynforth back in 1382.

Worth the ten-minute walk in.

This court sits a stone's throw from the National Glass Centre; one gets a striking overhead shot for the university's s...
21/08/2026

This court sits a stone's throw from the National Glass Centre; one gets a striking overhead shot for the university's socials, the other gets a pre-application inquiry for demolition. Investment, it seems, depends entirely on which side of the fence you're standing.

Funny what gets levelled, and what gets levelled to the ground.

St Peter's Campus sits on the banks of the Wear beside the National Glass Centre; a building that opened to celebrate 1,...
20/08/2026

St Peter's Campus sits on the banks of the Wear beside the National Glass Centre; a building that opened to celebrate 1,350 years of Sunderland's glassmaking heritage, and one the university now plans to demolish. The University of Sunderland has submitted a pre-application inquiry to the council's planning department as part of the next steps toward demolishing the centre, with the building set to close to the public on 31 July 2026. The university says the closure is needed because repairs would cost between £14m and £45m — a figure Sunderland City Council has publicly questioned, pressing the university for more detail on its repair estimates and finances.

Campaigners have accused the university of failing to properly address concerns over the reasoning behind its unaffordable repair and running cost claims, and the university has since sought a Certificate of Immunity from Historic England, which would prevent the building being listed or protected from demolition for five years. Meanwhile, the glass and ceramics courses that gave the centre its purpose are being scrapped entirely.

One building teaching the future. The other, next door, being quietly dismantled.

19/08/2026

Washington ‘F’ Pit stands as one of the last surviving reminders of the town’s coal‑mining past. Sunk in 1777, the pit worked for nearly two centuries, powering Washington’s growth through the Industrial Revolution.

The current winding house, the red‑brick landmark you see today, was built in 1880, housing the steam winder that hauled men and coal from deep underground. When the pit finally closed in 1964, the building was preserved as a rare example of Victorian colliery engineering.

Sunderland Fish Quay, Low Street; a working stretch of riverside going back to at least the 1700s, when fish was dried a...
18/08/2026

Sunderland Fish Quay, Low Street; a working stretch of riverside going back to at least the 1700s, when fish was dried and traded on the "commonty" between High Street and the Wear. The land once belonged to the Chantry of the Virgin Mary at Bishopwearmouth Church, before King James I passed it into private hands and the merchant George Lilburne built his house on it. The Elizabethan Custom House that once stood nearby on Low Street wasn't demolished until 1935, cleared to make way for the Corporation Quay you can still see today. Around it, warehouses like Wylam Wharf, trading here since 1601, and the old Exchange Building, Sunderland's first town hall, still stand watch over water that's carried coal, cargo, and catch for four centuries.

The Summerhill, Blaydon; once part of the grounds of Stella Hall, a manor house gifted by the Bishop of Durham to a Newc...
17/08/2026

The Summerhill, Blaydon; once part of the grounds of Stella Hall, a manor house gifted by the Bishop of Durham to a Newcastle nunnery in the 1100s, and a nunnery it stayed until the dissolution of the monasteries in the mid-1500s. The estate passed through the Tempests, then the Widdringtons, before falling to the Cowen family, industrialists who gave the north-east one of its most notable radicals: Joseph Cowen, born at Stella Hall in 1829. In 1867 he had a statue of his friend Giuseppe Garibaldi placed here beside the summerhouse. Jane Cowen, the last resident of the Hall, died in 1948; the Hall itself was demolished in the mid-1950s and replaced by housing. The folly on the hill, and the statue's head, are some of the only things left standing.

This is the Stony Heap Mine Water Treatment Scheme, built where the Eden Colliery's old upcast shaft once stood. When th...
16/08/2026

This is the Stony Heap Mine Water Treatment Scheme, built where the Eden Colliery's old upcast shaft once stood. When the pumps that kept a coal mine dry are switched off for good, the workings slowly flood, and the water picks up iron from the rock as it rises; eventually it has to go somewhere. Schemes like this one exist to catch it first: settling ponds and reed beds that let the iron drop out before the water ever reaches a river. It's quiet, unglamorous infrastructure, doing a job that never technically ends, on a site that spent 130 years pulling coal in the opposite direction.

15/08/2026

Ushaw’s story stretches across centuries. It begins in 1568, when the English College was founded at Douai. After the French Revolution in 1795, the community fled France and settled in County Durham, starting construction at Ushaw in 1804.

By 1808, St Cuthbert’s College opened its doors, growing through the 19th century into one of Britain’s most important Catholic seminaries. The site’s masterpiece, St Cuthbert’s Chapel, was designed by A.W. Pugin and completed in 1847, a landmark of Gothic Revival architecture.

The seminary closed in 2011, but Ushaw reopened in 2014 as a public heritage site, preserving its chapels, cloisters, libraries, and gardens for visitors.

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