Recommended parking is at N54º37.479 W001º49.489 where there is space for a few cars. From here walk down the hill and follow the footpath sign between the fences on the left. Cross the river and walk along the old railway to the next bridge. Cross the small stile on the right just before the bridge and follow the river up on to the viaduct.
There is room for one car at the stile at N54º37.353 W001º49.478 Follow the path up diagonally to the right, this leads to an information board and carries on up to meet the old railway line which gives a good dry path across the moor.
There is access from the village of Cockfield now as the old fence has been removed.
It is a lovely wild area with loads of industrial history and lots of wildlife. There is a visitors center close to the parking spot. Opening times as follows, April to September every day 11am - 3pm October to March Weekends 11am - 3pm
Now for some history.
Most of this was gleaned from some local history articles written by Chris Lloyd and published in The Northern Echo and reproduced with their permission.
George Dixon and his younger brother, Jeremiah, grew up playing on the fell, where their father owned several small coal-pits. There they learnt all sorts of mathematical skills, and Jeremiah became an astronomer. In 1761, the Royal Society sent him to Sumatra to study the path of the planet Venus. On the boat, he became very friendly with another astronomer, Charles Mason. After studying Venus, Mason and Dixon were sent to the US to use their mathematical skills to sort out a boundary dispute between Maryland and Pennsylvania. Between 1763 and 1769, they drew their line, which effectively separated the slave-owning states of the South from the free states of the North. The line, naturally, took their name - Mason-Dixon - and the Negro slaves in the South nicknamed the free land to the north "Dixie-land". It was there that Dixieland jazz grew up - with its roots firmly on Cockfield Fell. But George was frustrated. He had inherited the mines, but apart from keeping him in interesting experiments they were not much use, unless he could find someone to buy the coal. Cockfield Fell, up the Gaunless Valley, is miles from anywhere, so George resolved to build a canal from the fell to the River Tees around Winston. Then he would dig the Tees out and sail his boats to Stockton, and from there on to the huge London market. To prove he could do it, he dug a stretch of canal on the fell and built a flat-bottomed boat to sail on it. When it worked, he was so excited that he called his friend, landowner Lord Barnard, of Raby Castle, to come and have a look at it. But Lord Barnard was not impressed. He was not going to contribute financially to any such barmy project, and he certainly was not going to have waterways wandering across his land. Although the canal was never dug, it was the first time anyone had thought of linking the coalfield of south Durham to the sea. The idea resurfaced in the early 19th Century. Through his grandson the plans were resurrected and modified, and ended up as the Stockton and Darlington Railway, linking the coalfield with the sea. See my other cache GCN0N1
Cockfield Fell was a complete industry. The mines on the top of the fell fed the coal down to the river valley, which was lined with circular coke ovens. The remains of hundreds of these ovens can still be seen lining the fellside. Coal was fed into the top of the ovens then lit. Over the next three days, it became white hot, and all its impurities, including sulphur, were belched out of the top. After the heating process was complete, the ovens were opened and the white-hot coals were raked out and immediately doused with water from the Gaunless. What remained was called coke, which would burn hotter and for longer than coal, without so much smoke the next time it was lit. Along came a train on the Haggerleases branch line in the bottom of the valley and carried the coke off to market. The scouring of maps has suggested that there have been 549 collieries, drifts or shafts in the Gaunless Valley, the majority of which never had names. The Haggerleases railway branch line opened in 1830, and by 1852 there were at least 11 collieries working alongside it. The large tips along the middle of the fell come from the quarry which worked stone from the igneous Whin Sill which crosses the fell. It seems the quarry has been filled in, probably as a land fill with rubbish!! By 1896, there were 25 mines in operation in the valley employing 3,125 men. Probably the smallest was Copley, which employed just eight men. Cockfield's population in 1921 peaked at 2,693; Randolph Colliery was at its largest in about 1930, when it employed 824, as was Gordon House Colliery, on Cockfield Fell, which employed 504.
The ruins of the Lands Viaduct are the most spectacular of all the remains that lie on Cockfield Fell - the largest ancient monument in the North. But at least those remains, which once carried the railway line from Bishop Auckland to Barnard Castle over the fell, had a long and useful life. The viaduct, designed by Sir Thomas Bouch, stood for more than 100 years - unlike the far more famous bridge designed by Sir Thomas, the Tay Bridge, which collapsed in what is still regarded as the worst engineering failure ever seen in the British Isles. The viaduct was 640ft long and was 93ft above the Gaunless. It cost £15,422 to build (a little less than £700,000 today) and opened, with the rest of the line, which included another Bouch-built bridge at Langleydale, on August 1, 1863. Apart from passengers the line carried freight, Freight trains had two engines at the front and one at the back; in between were 36 20-ton wagons carrying County Durham coke westwards to the industries of Cumbria; iron ore for the steelworks of Spennymoor and Teesside came eastwards. Between 1900 and 1918, half-a-million tons of minerals were transported on the line. The girders and platform of Lands Viaduct were removed in 1964 and a couple of years later, dynamite was applied to its central column, which collapsed dramatically across the fell.