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Scremerston is a village in Northumberland, England. The village lies on the North Sea coast just under south of Berwick-upon-Tweed and from the Anglo-Scottish border. It is adjacent to the A1, providing access to Newcastle upon Tyne to the south, and to Edinburgh to the north.
Scremerston encompasses a number of satellite settlements scattered between the A1 and the coastline at Cocklawburn Beach. These include Borwell, Heatherytops, Inlandpasture, Redhouse, Scremerston Town Farm and Seahouse. Surviving miners' cottages include Restoration Cottages, Deputy Row and Derwentwater Terrace. Scremerston Hill farm and cottages lie to the south, but have been largely cut off from the village by the busy A1 road.
A sherd of a Bronze Age food urn was found at Scremerston Hill in 1925 and is held by National Museums Scotland.
A possible ring ditch and two ditches measuring approximately 8 metres by 6 metres considered to be of prehistoric/Roman origins lie 100m north-west of the Spittal Chain Low radar site. Both of these sites are documented on aerial photographs of crop markings. Two much larger prehistoric double ditched curvilinear enclosures are visible as cropmarks on air photographs about 750m to the east of Scremerston Town Farm. Each has inner ditches of over 50m in diameter.
The Devil's Causeway is a Roman Britain road extending across Northumberland from Portgate on Hadrian's Wall to Scremerston, disappearing just over before reaching the River Tweed. The route passes to the west of the Scremerston church, with all traces disappearing to the north east at Heathery Tops. The route was mapped during a three-year survey by Henry Maclauchlan, published in 1864. It has been suggested that the road's distinctive structure was designed for cavalry patrols rather than pedestrians or commerce, although no definitive evidence of Roman military structures has been found in the Tweedmouth area.
In 1980, a Romano-British settlement was excavated at Doubstead Field, 180m south of Scremerston village and about 90m west of the disused colliery railway. The site was later destroyed by the re-routing of the A1. During the excavation, traces of timber roundhouses were discovered in a rectilinear ditched enclosure, along with 130 sherds of pottery, various stone items, a hinged metal bracelet, a metal brooch, a spiral finger ring, fragments of glass bangles and skeletal remains of ox and horse. The site was dated to the late first or second century.
Scremerston Town Farm, which is marked as "Scremerston" on many maps until the mid-20th century, was once the site of a larger Middle Ages settlement and the remains of the earthworks and medieval ridge and furrow ploughing can still be seen. These are most prominent on the pasture between the farm and Doupster Burn to the north. Mid-16th century records mention that the village had a stone tower and enclosure, while 17th century records describe 40 cottages. Early maps show that they were arranged in two rows along a road running from east to west. The village began to shrink in the 18th century, with many of the remaining cottages used as agricultural buildings.Dixon, P.J., 1984. The Deserted Medieval Villages of North Northumberland, vol.2. Unpublished PhD Thesis, University of Wales, 520-2
The remains of ridge and furrow ploughing is also evident adjacent to Inlandpasture, suggesting this largely Georgian farmyard was built over an older settlement.
Scremerston village, colliery and surrounding lands instead passed on to the Radclyffe family (also recorded as Radcliff, Radclyff and Radcliffe) by marriage. The Radclyffes were made Earls of Derwentwater (hence Derwentwater Terrace) in 1688 by James II, but following a Jacobite rebellion James Radclyffe, 3rd Earl of Derwentwater was beheaded for treason at Tower Hill in 1716. On the death of his son in 1731, the estate was forfeited and granted to the Commissioners of Greenwich Hospital in 1735, who retain most of the estate to this day.
Scremerston Mill was a water-powered mill designed by renowned Leeds civil engineer John Smeaton in 1776. It was sited just north of Seahouse and the ruins are still visible. The corn mill was unique for having its own small harbour and an unusual horizontal Norse wheel. The mill is described in Rees's Cyclopædia as having a wheel in diameter with 12 "ladles" or concave paddles in diameter. The wheel's axle rose up to a cog which could turn one of two sets of grindstones. The larger set would turn 65 revolutions per minute while smaller set could turn at 88 revolutions a minute, and the mill was capable of grinding of corn an hour.
Hud's Head quarry, also known as Pier Quarry, lies between Hud's Head and The Skipper rock formation on the shoreline at the foot of the Scremerston Incline railway. It was active between 1808 and 1825 and was the source of the stone for Berwick Pier. The first stone of the pier was laid in 1810 and it was completed in 1826.
Scremerston was a local centre for coal mining from at least the 17th century. Records of the Committee for Compounding with Delinquents of 1650-52 show a colliery existed in Scremerston, although it had "drowned" and was "now useless to Berwick garrison". Following the village, colliery and surrounding lands passing to Greenwich Hospital in 1735, Nicholas Walton wrote to William Corbett, then secretary to the Greenwich Hospital reporting that the coal seam at Scremerston had been on fire for a number of years and, due to an increase in workings, a subsequent "admitting of Aire, has Increased, & is at present to that degree as to lay the workmen off work and unless some expedient is found the Collierys will inevitably be destroyed." A plan was described to block the levels and flood the mine to save it. Jack Tar Pit (also known as Scremerston New Winning, Scremerston Old Colliery and Greenwich Colliery) was sunk in 1840 by Robert Johnson and continued work until 1878. The site still includes a largely intact engine house and pumping engine house, both listed building. The coal seams beneath Scremerston were intensively mined and four other major pits in the village were Scremerston Colliery, Engine Pit, Rise Pit and Restoration Pit.
number of operated along the Scremerston coastline. A lime works sat at each end of Cocklawburn Beach, while another operated from Cuddy's cove just north of Seahouse. They supported around 190 people in now vanished coastal communities. The kilns included an infrastructure of , blacksmiths and steam engines. Limestone was quarried on site and the calcium oxide was produced using coal mined in nearby collieries in Scremerston village. The lime works was served by two horse-drawn railways which operated into the 20th century, and connected with the mainline railway via a dedicated lime depot near Scremerston railway station.
Scremerston's earliest documented brick and tile works was on the cliff-top site of the later Sandbank (aka Sea Side) Limeworks, operating between the early and mid-19th Century and was known as Sea Side Brick and Tile Works. Scremerston Brick and Tile Works operated between 1850-1943, by Carr & Company from 1855, Shoreswood & Scremerston Coal Company from 1873 and Scremerston Coal Company from 1894 but closing soon after. In the mid-1930s, Hartley Main Collieries built new works beside the derelict works with four large 'Newcastle' kilns producing bricks marked SMC (Scremerston Main Colliery), but this was short-lived and the brick works closed with the colliery in 1943. Borewell Tileworks appears on maps contemporaneously with Scremerston Brick and Tile Works in a survey of 1860 but had disappeared by 1898.
Industrialisation brought with it a growing population and new facilities. By the early Twentieth Century the village had its own Workman's Institute and football pitch on what is now the site of Berwick RFC, and a bandstand situated behind Derwentwater Terrace.
From 1941 to 1944, Scremerston was an operational base for an Auxiliary Unit Operational Patrol. The Auxiliary Units were a secret network of volunteers who would undertake armed resistance should the UK have been invaded. The Patrol had eight members including a miner, a coal hewer, a butcher, a driver and several clerks and farmers. The Patrol was the first to be formed in Northumberland and met at the Cat Inn (now the Island View Inn) south of Scremerston on the A1 road. Their base was a cellar at Inlandpasture farm, the entrance hidden beneath seed trays in a garden cold frame. The patrol was very lightly armed and would have been responsible for sabotaging the local infrastructure such as the railway, A1 road and bridges over the Tweed. For much of 1941 the unit was overseen by Anthony Quayle who, on leaving the army, returned to his acting career and became a household name.
Scremerston was bombed from the air on 3 March 1941, and 5 February 1942, causing minor damage but injuring two people, one seriously. On 23 July 2006, a bomb disposal team detonated an unexploded World War II bomb in a field close to the village.
A number of streets and settlements have disappeared along with industry. These include cottages at Colliery Row, Old Hill and Electricians Row, with many families moving to housing built by the local council at the request of the National Coal Board in the 1950s. Salt Pan How, Philadelphia and Sand Banks were three clusters of cottages which sat along the coastline at Cocklawburn Beach when the coast was a centre of lime production. The last of these cottages was abandoned in 1956.
The site of Jack Tar Pit (also known as Scremerston New Winning, Scremerston Old Colliery and Greenwich Colliery) was noted by Augustine Henry as an early example of Mine reclamation and afforestation, with the colliery, wagonway and spoil heap successfully planted as woodland in 1887 on the instruction of the Greenwich Hospital estate. The woodlands still stand and are known as Old Colliery Wood at the colliery site and Restoration Wood along the disused wagonway.
Scremerston sits within Ancroft civil parish. Prior to 1844, it lay within the ancient liberty of Islandshire, an exclave of the County Palatine of Durham. The Liberty is thought to date back to lands gifted by the Anglo-Saxons kingdom of Northumbria and originally extended from Budle Bay near Lindisfarne to Blackadder Water, a river in what was then Northumbria and is now East Lothian, Scotland. It also encompassed Northumbrian monastic lands up to the Firth of Forth. While much of southern Northumbria was conquered by Vikings and ultimately became the ridings of Yorkshire, the northern territories including the Scremerston area are thought to have remained unconquered, despite suffering many Viking raids. While this allowed for a degree of continuity of governance under local Earls and Bishops of Lindisfarne and Durham for many centuries, the Liberty was repeatedly overrun by armies from the north and south. Scotland expanded southwards, annexing all land north of the River Tweed, just from Scremerston, in 1018 but border wars continued until the nearby fortified port of Berwick-upon-Tweed changed hands for the final time, becoming permanently English in 1482 and moving the border with Scotland a further from the village.
Being south of the Tweed, the Scremerston area had effectively become part of England in 927 when Ealdred I of Bamburgh accepted Æthelstan as King of the English, but the local rule of Islandshire by the Bishops of Durham meant royal authority remained largely excluded from the area until jurisdiction was transferred to the Crown by the Durham (County Palatine) Act 1836.
Following the passing of The Counties (Detached Parts) Act 1844, Islandshire joined the county of Northumberland as a Hundred (or Ward). In 1894, Scremerston formed part of the Norham and Islandshires rural district under the Local Government Act 1894 which survived until 1974. It was abolished under the Local Government Act 1972 and Scremerston formed part of the Borough of Berwick upon Tweed until 2009, when the county of Northumberland became a unitary authority.
Census data shows a population in 1801 of 1,144 people. The population peaked in 1861 at 2,113 but by 1961 had more than halved to 1,012 and by 1981 had fallen to 825. The number of homes had remained fairly consistent between the 1840s and 1980s (317 homes in 1841, 333 in 1981) but the size of households had fallen from a peak average of 5.6 people per home in 1861 to an average of 3 in 1961 and 2.5 people per home by 1981.
Retail is limited and currently consists of a cafe and outdoors clothing outlet. Holiday accommodation includes a number of self-catering cottages and a small holiday park at Borewell Farm known as Pot-A-Doodle Do, which also incorporates a cafe, small shop and activity centre. Berwick RFC is based in the village with a large premises and runs activities for all ages. The only remaining public house is the Island Inn (formerly the Cat Inn) on the A1 south of Scremerston village. The Miners Arms, to the north of the village on the route to Tweedmouth, is now a residential dwelling.
Scremerston is a former industrial village, and much of its growth in the 18th and 19th centuries can be attributed to a range of industries exploiting the resources of the Scremerston Formation. These included stone, lime, clay, sand and coal leading to industries such as tile and brick making, quarrying, lime production and coal mining. The area was also the site of salt pans, a water powered mill, ice houses for fisheries and a windmill.
Much of the Great North Road route became part of a new route designated the "A1" by the Ministry of Transport in 1921, and the A1 passed through the village until 1983. The A1 is the longest numbered road in the UK, at , connecting Greater London, the capital of England, with Edinburgh, the capital of Scotland. While the Great North Road passed through villages and towns, the A1 was incrementally diverted around built up areas through a series of by-passes. Scremerston was by-passed in 1983 when the A1 was diverted to the west to avoid Berwick-upon-Tweed. This required a 195m bridge costing £9.5million to traverse the Tweed. The new route diverged at Jack Tar Pit (also called Scremerston New Winning, Scremerston Old Colliery and Greenwich Colliery) 600m from the village church.
The Great North Road / A1 once passing through the village has given it a distinctive, straight approach and unusually wide main thoroughfare.
The mainline railway runs parallel to the coast in the area, making local vehicle access to the coastline only possible via a level crossing at the now defunct Scremerston railway station. An underpass at Seaview can be accessed on foot but the track is too steep and uneven for most vehicles.
National Cycle Route 1 (NCN1) of the National Cycle Network passes through the area along the coastline, on the same route as the Northumberland Coast Path. The route runs for from Dover to Shetland. Locally, the route is traffic free from the southern approach until it joins the coastal road at Cocklawburn Beach. From Seahouse it becomes traffic-free again, although unsurfaced, crossing the Berwick-upon-Tweed boundary at Seaview. The cycle route also forms part of the EV12 North Sea Cycle Route which extends from Norway to Scotland via Sweden, Denmark, Germany, France and England. The coastal cycle route is the only designated cycle route in the area.
Access to the coastline is restricted by the mainline railway. A small bridge crosses the line between Seahouse and Seaview, but is not a public right of way and access is blocked. All of the unprotected railway foot crossings in the area have been closed due to safety concerns as the local speed limit for trains is 110 mph. The final unprotected foot crossing at Inlandpasture was blocked in 2020, leading to the disuse of sections of local public rights of way. The level crossing at Seahouse and an underpass at Seaview are the only remaining means of crossing the railway on foot in the area.
The signal box, which stood on the opposite side of the road, was closed in 1981 and demolished soon after. Since 1960, it had only served the level crossing and once the gates were replaced with remotely controlled electronic barriers in 1980, it became redundant.
Scremerston's first railway, an early form called a plateway, was built of iron L-shaped plates on stone sleepers between Hudds Head quarry and Spittal for the transportation of stone for the Berwick Pier. It was opened in 1810 and was in part powered by gravity, bringing the wagons down off the cliffs - reputedly at high speed - and in part by horses to pull the wagons across Spittal to Carr Rock. Following the completion of the pier and a period of disuse, the plateway was re-utilised by the Scremerston colliery to transport coal, although its use was not strictly permitted. Once legal issues were resolved, the line was extended up to the Scremerston colliery (Restoration Pit) in 1824 and it is likely that at this time the 'plateway' was replaced with true rails.
This wagonway used horses to move coal to the top of a new incline, where rope controlled the descent towards the coast. The line was later extended across Scremerston to the Jack Tar/Greenwhich Pit and route remains fully passable as a public footpath from the Jack Tar pit buildings to the East Coast Main Line.
Scremerston Wagonway was a 19th century wagonway linking the Scremerston Main Colliery (SMC) and tile works to the Scremerston Incline and was operated until 1938 as an industrial railway using steam locomotives. From the SMC site, the railway crossed the A1 at Derwentwater Terrace to join the Incline at Restoration Cottages.
Scremerston Lime Works had its own wagonways linking the coastal kilns at Cocklawburn to the main line at Cockley Burn Woods.
Scremerston Tileworks located just north of Deputy Row had a single track railway from its clay pit to the brickyard. When the Scremerston Main Colliery was opened, a tramway was used to transport 'seggar' clay from the mineworkings to the kilns. Bricks were marked SMC after the Scremerston Main Colliery. A later brickworks opened by the Scremerston and Shoreswood Colliery Company used a horse drawn tramway to haul clay from a pit across the A1 (since diverted from the village) to the brickyard. The works were closed in 1943-44 and the tramway removed.
Scremerston children are required to travel to middle school from the age of 10 years, the nearest being in Tweedmouth. The nearest secondary school is also in Tweedmouth, though Scremerston children may also commute across the Scottish border to Eyemouth or Berwickshire to attend secondary school from the age of 14 years.
Prior to the current First School opening in 1974, teaching took place in Scremerston County First School which opened in 1842. This older school building is now a residential dwelling.
Arthur Humble Evans FRSE (23 February 1855 – 28 March 1943) was a British people ornithologist. He was born the son of Rev Hugh Evans, the local vicar, in Scremerston. His publications included Birds (illustrated by George Edward Lodge, Cambridge Natural History, 1899), Aves Hawaiienses (1890-1899, with Scott Barchard Wilson), A Vertebrate Fauna of the Shetland Islands (1899, with Thomas Edward Buckley), Handbook to the Natural History of Cambridgeshire (1904), Turner on Birds (1903),William Turner's Avium praecipuarum, quarum Plinium et Aristotelum mentio est, brevis et succincta historia. Gymnicus, Cologne. ed Cambridge 1823; edited with transl. by A. H. Evans, Cambridge U. Press, 1903 A Fauna of the Tweed Area (1911) and The Birds of Britain (1916).
Rainfall is relatively low by English standards, with an average annual rainfall of compared to for England as a whole. Rainfall is spread fairly evenly throughout the year, but highest between July and October. Average sunshine hours are typical for England at 1508.5 hours per year compared to an all England average of 1492.7 hours per year. Scremerston weather data is sourced from the nearest climate station at Berwick-upon-Tweed, located from Scremerston and operated by the Met Office.
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