The 12th Earl of Strathmore, a 19th-century nimby who made an immense fortune from coal, refused to allow trains to run across his estate, so the North Eastern Railway used an expensive alternative route. It became the Derwent Walk Country Park after the line closed.
There is a view from the parapet of the Nine Arches that is exhilarating: a vibrant pointillist canvas of a tree canopy, painted with bursting leaf buds, and an earthbound opportunity to see woodland from the perspective of the red kite that soared over.
The path goes into the long cutting at the western end. Its steep, wooded banks are bright with flowers. The Dutch rush, or rough horsetail, is a fossil that was found hidden among them.
It is a thicket of green, hollow, corrugated stems that is thinner than a pencil. In the spring, some are tipped with bullet-shaped spore cones, clothed in tiny polygonal tiles that separate and release tiny wind-borne spores, each with four arms called elaters that act as sails. What a story it has to tell, one of evolution's minimalist efforts.
Horsetail stems have a high content of silica. Fragments of rough horsetail, some as tall as today's forest trees, once trundled past here in railway wagons, embedded in the millions of tons of coal they transported from Durham coalfields to colliers moored at s
The National Trust has taken over the care of Gibside Hall, which has become a romantic ruin since the Nine Arches was built. Coal-based industries that used to fill this rewilded valley are hidden. There is a tropical landscape of giant horsetails that still influences our lives. The climate of our planet is changing due to the release of carbon dioxide.
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