Medomsley is a village in County Durham,

England England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Wales to its west and Scotland to its north. The Irish Sea lies northwest and the Celtic Sea to the southwest. It is separated from continental Europe b ...

, about northeast of the centre of Consett, south of Hamsterley and southeast of

Ebchester Ebchester is a village in County Durham, England. It is situated to the north of Consett and to the south east of Whittonstall. The village sits at the intersection of the A694, which runs from Consett to Swalwell, and the B6309, which connects ...

. Medomsley is about above sea level, atop a hill overlooking the Derwent Valley. The village has views of the Pennines and the surrounding countryside for miles around.

Toponym

The Boldon Book of 1183 records Medomsley as ''Medomesley''. The '' Vita S Godrici'', written in 1190, records it as ''Madmeslei''. The

placename Toponymy, toponymics, or toponomastics is the study of ''toponyms'' ( proper names of places, also known as place names and geographic names), including their origins, meanings, usage and types. Toponym is the general term for a proper name of ...

is derived from

Old English Old English (, ), or Anglo-Saxon, is the earliest recorded form of the English language, spoken in England and southern and eastern Scotland in the early Middle Ages. It was brought to Great Britain by Anglo-Saxon settlers in the mid-5th c ...

and may mean the “middlemost clearing” or “Maethhelm’s clearing”.

Parish church

The Church of England parish church of St Mary Magdalene is a sandstone building completed in the 13th century. In 1878 it was restored to designs by the architects HJ Austin, RJ Johnson and WS Hicks, who added a new roof, chancel screen (designed by Hicks) and north aisle. It is a

Grade I listed building In the United Kingdom, a listed building or listed structure is one that has been placed on one of the four statutory lists maintained by Historic England in England, Historic Environment Scotland in Scotland, in Wales, and the Northern Irel ...

. Medomsley's church served many inhabitants of

Shotley Bridge Shotley Bridge is a village, adjoining the town of Consett in County Durham, England. It is on the A694 road and beside the River Derwent which is crossed by the bridge giving the name. It was once the heart of Britain's swordmaking industry. ...

for baptisms, marriages and burials until the creation of Shotley Bridge parish in the 19th century. The sword-makers of Shotley Bridge were frequent visitors of the church, and the

parish register A parish register in an ecclesiastical parish is a handwritten volume, normally kept in the parish church in which certain details of religious ceremonies marking major events such as baptisms (together with the dates and names of the parents), ma ...

s record many of these events.

Notable people

The antiquarian and

physician A physician (American English), medical practitioner (Commonwealth English), medical doctor, or simply doctor, is a health professional who practices medicine, which is concerned with promoting, maintaining or restoring health through th ...

Christopher Hunter (1675–1757) was born at Medomsley Hall.

Coal mining

There were two

collieries Coal mining is the process of resource extraction, extracting coal from the ground. Coal is valued for its Energy value of coal, energy content and since the 1880s has been widely used to generate electricity. Steel and cement industries use c ...

near the village: Medomsley Colliery southwest of the village and Derwent Colliery immediately to the north. Medomsley Colliery was opened in 1839. It was also known as the Busty pit, and is not to be confused with South Medomsley Colliery near Annfield Plain. Derwent Colliery was opened in 1856. Both pits were opened by Edward Richardson and Co. The

Consett Iron Company The Consett Iron Company Ltd was an industrial business based in the Consett area of County Durham in the United Kingdom. The company owned coal mines and limestone quarries, and manufactured iron and steel. It was registered on 4 April 1864 a ...

took them over in the 1860s. They were nationalised in 1947. Coal left the two pits by rail. A freight-only railway ran south from Derwent Colliery ''via'' Medomsley Colliery to a junction west of Leadgate, where it joined the Stanhope and Tyne line of the North Eastern Railway. There were several mining accidents at the pits. One in 1923 killed eight miners. In 1957, in another accident, two miners were rescued uninjured. The

National Coal Board The National Coal Board (NCB) was the statutory corporation created to run the nationalised coal mining industry in the United Kingdom. Set up under the Coal Industry Nationalisation Act 1946, it took over the United Kingdom's collieries on "ve ...

closed Derwent Colliery in 1964 and Medomsley Colliery in 1972. It proposed

opencast Open-pit mining, also known as open-cast or open-cut mining and in larger contexts mega-mining, is a surface mining technique of extracting rock (geology), rock or minerals from the earth from an open-air pit, sometimes known as a Borrow pit, b ...

coal mining near Medomsley, but in 1976 the

Secretary of State for Energy A secretary, administrative professional, administrative assistant, executive assistant, administrative officer, administrative support specialist, clerk, military assistant, management assistant, office secretary, or personal assistant is a wh ...

Tony Benn Anthony Neil Wedgwood Benn (3 April 1925 – 14 March 2014), known between 1960 and 1963 as Viscount Stansgate, was a British politician, writer and diarist who served as a Cabinet minister in the 1960s and 1970s. A member of the Labour Party, ...

, rejected the proposal.

Amenities

Scheduled bus services link Medomsley with Consett and Newcastle upon Tyne. Medomsley has a cricket club, at High Westwood, that was founded in 1926.

Youth detention centres

Hassockfield youth detention centre is on a site on the edge of Medomsley.

Medomsley Detention Centre

The site was previously

Medomsley Detention Centre Medomsley Detention Centre was a prison for young male offenders near Consett in County Durham, Durham, England from 1961 until the late 1980s, where more than 1,800 living former inmates have reported sexual and physical abuse by staff. Police b ...

, where some staff sexually and physically abused thousands of boys in the 1970s and 80s. In 1988 the centre closed after the scandal of the paedophile officer Neville Husband.

Hassockfield detention centre

The centre was re-opened in 1999. In 2004 Adam Rickwood, a resident of Hassockfield, committed suicide. After this incident Hassockfield improved its performance, but it was closed again in 2015.