ABOUT MURTON

Murton
Across the busy A19 just west of Cold Hesledon is the Dalton Park retail outlet park which now includes a cinema as well as a selection of high street shops. Nearby is the substantial former mining village of Murton.

Murton Village
The name Murton means ‘Moor Farm’ and was first recorded in 1200, as ‘Morton’. Around 1277 it was called ‘Morton Daudre’ from the D’Audrey family who then owned the manor. It first occurs as Murton in the 1360s with the new spelling apparently due to the influence of the local ‘Northumbrian’ dialect – Northumbrian in its broadest geographical sense.

Later owners of Murton were the Lumleys but in the 1600s it belonged to the Shipperdsons and was known during that century as ‘Murton-on-the-Moor’ or ‘Murton-le-Whins’. It was later called ‘Murton-in-the-Whins’ during the early nineteenth century though the new mining village was called Murton Colliery.

The tiny core of the original agricultural village of Murton lies towards the west of the present village and can be seen around the Village Inn. It is a reminder of what much of once sleepy East Durham must have looked like before the colonisation of mining activity from the third decade of the nineteenth century onward.

Murton Village, The Village Inn
The old farming village was initially separate from the colliery village to the west but now it is all one, though most of the original houses and terraces of the colliery village have gone, replaced by later streets and houses as is typical with most County Durham pit villages.

Murton Colliery, also known as Dalton Winning Colliery, was opened in 1838 and according to Whellan’s 1894 Directory of Durham ‘the winning’ of this colliery was one of the most difficult and expensive undertakings of the kind on record.

In the nineteenth century Murton’s mine had the usual influx of miners from neighbouring parts of the region as well as men from Ireland but Murton was unusal for being home to a significant influx of miners from the far south west, from Devon and Cornwall.

Murton Colliery continued to be a major mine in the County Durham coalfield during the twentieth century, taking on miners from neighbouring South Hetton when that mine closed in 1982. Murton was one of the small group of Durham Collieries to survive into the 1990s and finally closed on November 29, 1991.