Stockton & Darlington Railway Boundary Stone

Summary

Property boundary marker for the Stockton & Darlington Railway (S&DR) considered to have been placed before the opening of the line in 1825.

Reasons for Designation

The Stockton & Darlington Railway Boundary Stone, 95m south of Millennium Way, Newton Aycliffe, is listed at Grade II for the following principal reasons:

Architectural interest:
* as a rare in-situ survival of a once very common feature of the Stockton & Darlington Railway;
* being well-preserved, retaining its well-executed and clearly legible inscription.

Historic interest:
* as a boundary marker for the pioneering and internationally influential Stockton & Darlington Railway.

History

An Act of Parliament passed in 1821 granted the Stockton & Darlington Railway (S&DR) powers to compulsorily purchase the land required to build its railway. This Act went on to stipulate that the railway’s property boundary should be marked ‘with good and sufficient Posts, Rails, Hedges, Ditches, Mounds, or other Fences’. In practice the company appears to have generally marked its boundary with walls or hedges, walls being more commonly used for the western portions of the railway, with hedging more common to the eastern part. The company also marked the property boundaries with frequent marker stones inscribed S&DR. Few of these stones appear to have been mapped by the Ordnance Survey and very few still survive in situ. Some marker stones are now held in museum collections: one well-preserved example has been relocated to the garden of Soho House, Shildon, the Grade II*-listed former home of Timothy Hackworth, the S&DR’s first Superintendent of Locomotives. That stone stands around 1m high but appears to have been designed to stand around 0.6m high, the thicker, more roughly finished base of the stone probably being designed to be set into the ground. The example 95m south of Millennium Way is not identified on any maps but is sited on the 1825 boundary of the S&DR, on the western side of the line, the inscription appropriately facing away from the line. It is effectively identical in appearance to the one at Soho House, but presumably more deeply set into the ground.

Through its willingness to share information with visiting engineers and railway promoters, the S&DR was highly influential in the establishment of other railways both in England and abroad. The engineer responsible for the construction of the S&DR was George Stephenson (1781-1848), who went on to engineer the Liverpool & Manchester Railway (opened 1830) and several subsequent lines, being popularly regarded as ‘the Father of the Railways’.

Details

Boundary marker, 1825 for the Stockton & Darlington Railway.

MATERIALS: a single piece of finely dressed sandstone.

DESCRIPTION: an earth-fast stone pillar, the upper portion (about 0.5m high) being about 0.3m by 0.2m. The west & east faces have a rounded top, the west face (facing away from the line) being deeply inscribed in Roman lettering set on two lines thus:
S&
DR

Sources

Websites
The 1825 S&DR: Historic Environment Audit. Appendix 3 (see p 43), accessed 08 June 2021 from https://www.darlington.gov.uk/media/10408/appendix-3-2016-10-23-management-shildon-to-county-boundary-2019-revision.pdf

End of official list entry

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