The History of Hill House East

The present Hill House East dates back over 150 years but we are reliably informed that there has been a house on this site for over 300 years.  The hamlet of ‘Hill Houses’ actually predates the village of Westgate and has been in existence since the Normans first cleared the forest in Weardale in the twelfth century. The ‘Prince Bishops of Durham’ of those times created a Deer Park for their personal hunting use in the centre of Weardale, surrounded by a deer wall thirteen miles in circumference, into which there were two entrances, an Eastgate and a Westgate, hence the names of the present day villages.  There is a plaque beside the road just a few hundred yards from the house showing where the line of the westerly part of the medieval wall ran. The valley behind and south west of the house is called ‘Swinhope’ – meaning ‘Boar Valley’ – indicating that not only deer were plentiful for hunting in Weardale in centuries past. There is a Roman altar beside the road in Eastgate on which a hunter gives thanks for a particularly fine boar he had killed.

 

There are – alas or thankfully? – no longer any wild boar around, though roe deer are still to be found in the forested areas of Weardale and we have personally seen a wild muntjack deer crossing the Swinhope road! However, we still have our share of interesting wildlife and any stay at Hill House East tends to include an introduction to our resident chickens, Swaledale sheep and an abundance of wild birds.