Barrasford is a village in

Northumberland Northumberland () is a county in Northern England, one of two counties in England which border with Scotland. Notable landmarks in the county include Alnwick Castle, Bamburgh Castle, Hadrian's Wall and Hexham Abbey. It is bordered by land on ...

, England. It is situated to the north of

Hexham Hexham ( ) is a market town and civil parishes in England, civil parish in Northumberland, England, on the south bank of the River Tyne, formed by the confluence of the North Tyne and the South Tyne at Warden, Northumberland, Warden nearby, and ...

, on the

North Tyne North is one of the four compass points or cardinal directions. It is the opposite of south and is perpendicular to east and west. ''North'' is a noun, adjective, or adverb indicating direction or geography. Etymology The word ''north'' is ...

. Barrasford is an ancient village that lies within the shadow of

Haughton Castle Haughton Castle is a privately owned country mansion and Grade I listed building, situated to the north of the village of Humshaugh on the west bank of the North Tyne. It is around north of the market town of Hexham, Northumberland Northum ...

. The village is notable for being the location of a

Bronze Age The Bronze Age is a historic period, lasting approximately from 3300 BC to 1200 BC, characterized by the use of bronze, the presence of writing in some areas, and other early features of urban civilization. The Bronze Age is the second pri ...

burial site where the Reaverhill Dagger was excavated in 1964. Today Barrasford is noted for its

quarry A quarry is a type of open-pit mine in which dimension stone, rock, construction aggregate, riprap, sand, gravel, or slate is excavated from the ground. The operation of quarries is regulated in some jurisdictions to reduce their envi ...

. The scourge of tuberculosis lent urgency to the need for action in the North East. In 1902 a subscription fund was set up to finance the building of a sanatorium to treat patients. William Watson-Armstrong, who became Baron Armstrong after the death of his great uncle Lord Armstrong of Cragside, gave £4000 – equivalent to £350,000 today. The Newcastle upon Tyne and Northumberland sanatorium opened in 1907 on the moors above the neighbouring villages of Barrasford and Gunnerton. It treated victims of tuberculosis at a time when 60,000 people a year were dying from the disease in England and Wales, and the annual mortality rate in Newcastle alone was nearly 600. In 1974 Barrasford was the setting for the "Affairs and Relations" episode of ''Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads?''.

Governance

Barrasford is in the

parliamentary A parliamentary system, or parliamentarian democracy, is a system of democracy, democratic government, governance of a sovereign state, state (or subordinate entity) where the Executive (government), executive derives its democratic legitimacy ...

constituency of

Transport

Barrasford was served by Barrasford railway station on the

Border Counties Railway The Border Counties Railway was a railway line connecting in Northumberland, with on the Waverley Route in Roxburghshire. Its promoter had hopes of exploiting mineral resources in the area, and it was taken up by the North British Railway, ...

which linked the

Newcastle and Carlisle Railway The Newcastle & Carlisle Railway (N&CR) was an English railway company formed in 1825 that built a line from Newcastle upon Tyne on Britain's east coast, to Carlisle, on the west coast. The railway began operating mineral trains in 1834 between ...

, near

, with the Border Union Railway at Riccarton Junction. The first section of the route was opened between

and Chollerford in 1858, and the remainder in 1862. The line was closed to passengers by

British Railways British Railways (BR), which from 1965 traded as British Rail, was a state-owned company that operated most of the overground rail transport in Great Britain from 1948 to 1997. It was formed from the nationalisation of the Big Four British rai ...

in 1956. Part of the line is now beneath the surface of

Kielder Water Kielder Water is a large man-made reservoir in Northumberland in North East England. It is the largest artificial lake in the United Kingdom by capacity of water and it is surrounded by Kielder Forest, one of the biggest man-made woodlands in E ...

Notable people

Geoffrey Rippon Aubrey Geoffrey Frederick Rippon, Baron Rippon of Hexham, PC, QC (28 May 1924 – 28 January 1997) was a British Conservative Party politician. He is most known for drafting the European Communities Act 1972 which took the United Kingdom into ...

– The village was for many years the home of Cabinet Minister

who had responsibility for negotiating Britain's entry into the Common Market.

References

External links

Images of Haughton Castle
{{authority control Villages in Northumberland

Governance

Transport

Notable people

See also

References

External links