Castles, cathedrals, museums and music: What’s not to like in this overlooked part of northern England?

Hero house

It take a lot to get me, a south-westerner to the bone, to the north of England — no one in their right mind could enjoy those dismal motorways — but this trip to an unsung part of Co Durham was truly worth it.

The Durham Dales (the Co Durham part of the North Pennines National Landscape) are much bypassed en route to the more famous Yorkshire Dales, Lake District or Northumberland coast.

Most general knowledge of Barnard Castle, off the busy, panoramic A66 between the A1 and the M6, is limited to the fact that Charles Dickens visited in 1838 to research bleak northern boarding schools for Nicholas Nickleby and, more recently, a government adviser famously drove there to test his eyes during covid. In fact, it’s a delightful town that is home to one of this country’s great art collections, of which more anon.

We stayed at North Farm, Walworth, a seven-bedroom, five-bathroom farmhouse pleasantly isolated in footpath-riven farmland, yet only a 10-minute drive from the A1. The house is owned by the writer Philip Eade — his biographical subjects include the young Prince Philip, Evelyn Waugh and Sylvia, ‘Queen of the Headhunters’ — and has been decorated as cheerfully and dramatically as one would expect from the imaginative interior designer Rita Konig; look it up in Jeremy Musson’s book English Country House Interiors (2011, Rizzoli).

I travelled there with three old and good friends and there were no arguments about bedrooms; all, from the Hyacinth Room to the ointment-pink room to the one with the four-poster (mine), are charming. Nothing is too ‘matchy-matchy’ (this is a compliment); it’s a home, not a showroom, with a happy atmosphere.

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There is, as one would expect from the owner, an eclectic abundance of books and plenty of squashy chairs in which to read them. The four-oven Aga had been lit in the beguiling kitchen.

Outside, sheep grazed beside the drive and sunshine filtered through a laden apple tree in the mellow walled garden. We only spent three nights in North Farm, but it was home from the first moments.

Seven nights at North Farm costs from £2,989. Visit the Crabtree and Crabtree website for more information and to book.

Need to know

Walworth Castle dates from the 12th century and was finished in its present form in about 1600. It was then owned by Elizabeth Jenison, widow of Thomas Jenison, the Auditor General of Ireland; on April 14, 1603, she entertained James Vl of Scotland when he was on his way to his coronation as James l of England.

The castle later passed to the Aylmer family and then the Eade family, who owned it during the Second World War when it was a prisoner-of-war camp. It became a girls’ school and, finally, a hotel.

What to eat

• Rural pubs are the order of the day — and very friendly they are, too, as well as good value for money — unless you want to drive into Barnard Castle, Durham or Darlington. The recommended local is The Fox Hole in nearby Piercebridge; it lived up to expectation. As in most northern pubs, it helps to go there hungry as the helpings are generous: the bowl of mussels in the excellent seafood-platter starter (for two people) was a meal in itself
• There is, admittedly, something faintly quaint about the Tavern bar at the Walworth Castle Hotel — we were pretty much the only people in there, as the hotel residents seemed to be eating elsewhere — but there was a kindly welcome and the two-minute walk after a five-hour drive was blissful, as were the steaks and bottle of Fleurie

What to do

Learn The Bowes Museum is a fantastical place that seems to have been magically translocated from the Loire Valley in France; it is the legacy of the 19th-century collectors John Bowes and his French artist wife, Joséphine, and is stuffed with porcelain, Flemish and Italian paintings and much more; its most famous exhibit is the mechanised silver swan, which lives up to its billing and is mesmerising. The gallery was wonderfully uncrowded on our visit, too.

Sit back and listen The girls’ choir was on duty at Evensong at Durham Cathedral(above); its rendering of Brahms’s Geistliches Lied floated Heaven-wards and was exquisite. The cathedral’s most famous treasure is the shrine to St Bede in the Galilee Chapel, but there was much interest in the tributes to the Durham Light Infantry: the great uncle of one of our party headed a horrifyingly long list of the fallen in only one day of carnage in the First World War.

Step back in history We easily whiled away several hours at Raby Castle — coffee, a tour of the tranquil, 18th-century walled gardens remodelled three years ago by Luciano Giubbilei, lunch, walking in the 200-acre deer park and watching frisky fallow bucks clash antlers, tea and, oh yes, the spectacular castle itself, with its impressive art collection and breathtaking central hall complete with a stuffed longhorn bull’s head.

The castle was built in the 14th century by the Neville family and later seized by the Crown when Charles Neville sided with Mary, Queen of Scots in the Rising of the North.

In 1626, Henry Vane the Elder, a courtier of James l, bought it; he also met a sticky end. More peaceful, affluent times followed and, in 2016, Vane’s descendant, Harry, 12th Lord Barnard, and his wife, Kate, inherited Raby, beginning a new era of transformation and thus assuring the future of this most magical place.

Walk the Weardale Way (or bits of it) This varied trail of some 75 miles, via Lumley Castle, Bishop Auckland and Stanhope, runs from the Bede Memorial Cross at the mouth of the River Wear in Sunderland to the Kill-hope Lead Mining Museum.

This feature originally appeared in the October 28, 2026, issue of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.