The Jackdaws of Front Street

I sometimes wonder what the view was like in 1831 when my father's house was built. Here in 2023 the view is of two Edwardian houses hosting, as it happens every morning,  squabbling jackdaws on a rooftop.

I am of an age when funerals are more regular than I'd ideally prefer, this time the mother of my best friend in the North East. An excuse then this week to spend a couple of days up north to catch up with my ninety two year old father while also paying my respects. 

Back-a-long when his house was built in East Boldon, then County Durham, the view out the front would have been over fields, and a blacksmiths. Most of the fields are remarkably still there, sadly now hidden by two Edwardian terraces. His house is built on what the deeds describe as a ropery, or rope-age plot. Next door is the Black Bull pub, a former coaching inn which was built around 1750. This was a stopping off inn for the stage coaches between Sunderland (5 miles) and Newcastle (9 miles), and, until recently, the original mortuary existed at the rear. Travel in those days was slightly different to today, one could not guarantee to reach the destination in bad weather. 

The coming of the railway lines began to change the world and stage traffic began to decline. Presumably trade was falling off and the field adjacent to the inn where the replacement stage horses were kept, was sold off and the area to build what is now my fathers house 'roped off' for sale. Or at least that's how I understand it after a little research. And so this late Georgian house came into being and was called Linden House when new. Today it simply has a number and is part of a terrace of individual houses along the main road.

The Sunderland to Newcastle railway line opened in 1839, part of the Brandling Line which itself is one of the oldest in the World, having first run mining wagons as part of the Tanfield Waggonway which began in 1725. East Boldon did not really exist before the trains. It was simply a collection of farms and rural buildings clustered around the inn and along the main Toll Road, the Toll Cottage still exists a couple of miles away. However once the railway station opened in 1839 East Boldon developed rapidly from the station as a centre of travel, for about a mile along a new road up to the Toll Road. As the centre point of the village changed, the area where my father's house now sits became somewhat of a periphery part of the newer village, separated by fields from the much older West Boldon village a country mile away. Where I myself grew up.

None of this history refers to the sound of jackdaws squabbling every morning on the house opposite. Yet I am convinced the DNA of jackdaws at the time of stage travel continues to flow through their veins.  

As long as I can remember this house opposite my father's has had jackdaws on the roof. It is only these two buildings they seem to communally alight on. There are a lot of jackdaw and rook still in the village despite the main road, once the preserve of horses and human footfall, being now a thundering arterial gash of commuters and lorries which never sleeps as they head to the A19 or Newcastle. Yet every morning for decades when I've stayed at my father's house at dawn there is a calamitous clattering and yakkering of jackdaws on this roof. In the evening these birds fly over to West Boldon where there is a large roost site. But here on a man made roof they loaf and fidget. Why they do this I have no idea. Heat maybe from the house below? Moss on the tiles to flick through? Or simply they've always come here. As the crow flies foraging fields are less than a minute away, fields which now are no longer full of cattle but leisure-time horse livery, plenty of easy pickings in that environment for a hungry corvid.

But I love the jackdaws just being my alarm call as yet another Amazon van, or a police car with sirens blaring thunders by ahead of the double decker busses sardine like with children off to school. The days when East Boldon was a simple farming community are long gone, but it is wonderful to think a little of the old days remain, in the descendants of those jackdaws here in 1831, who still come to this rooftop every morning the loaf and fidget. Long may that continue in this little corner of the mighty and ever expanding Tyneside Conurbation.