Qualla: Yarm

Yarm: Introduction

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Lee Bunce, CC BY 4.0. On 12 February 1821, a group of men met in the George and Dragon Inn on Yarm's High Street and decided to push the third Bill through Parliament for a railway between Stockton and Darlington. Two previous attempts had failed. This one succeeded, and four years later the world's first permanent steam-hauled passenger railway opened. The conversation that started it took place in a market town on a meander of the Tees, in a coaching inn that is still standing. Yarm's High Street, voted Britain's best in a 2007 BBC Breakfast poll, runs past Georgian buildings with red pantile roofs, a town hall from 1710, and the seven-million-brick viaduct that crosses the town on forty-three arches. Tom Brown, who lost his fingers cutting his way through enemy lines at the Battle of Dettingen in 1743, lived in a house here that dates from around 1480.

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Image: Lee Bunce | CC BY 4.0

Yarm: The Place of the Fish Pools

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Hermann Luyken, CC BY-SA 3.0. The name Yarm comes from the Old English gearum, the dative plural of gear, meaning a pool for catching fish. It appears in the Domesday Book of 1086, then a chapelry of Kirklevington in the North Riding of Yorkshire, later a parish in its own right. Dominican friars settled here...

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Image: Hermann Luyken | CC BY-SA 3.0

Yarm: Bishop Skirlaw's Bridge and the Civil War

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Alex McGregor, CC BY-SA 2.0. Bishop Skirlaw of Durham built a stone bridge across the Tees at Yarm in 1400. It still stands, weathered through six centuries. An iron replacement built in 1805 collapsed in 1806. The medieval bridge has carried traffic ever since, currently the A67 trunk road. On 1 February 16...

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Image: Alex McGregor | CC BY-SA 2.0

Yarm: The Viaduct and the Funfair

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Pauline E, CC BY-SA 2.0. The Yarm Viaduct was built between 1849 and 1851 for the Leeds Northern Railway by Thomas Grainger and John Bourne. It is 2,280 feet long, comprises seven million bricks, and has 43 arches, the two over the river skewed in cut stone to take the load of the angled crossing. It sti...

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Image: Pauline E | CC BY-SA 2.0

Yarm: Tom Brown and the Last Battlefield Knight

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Gordon Hatton, CC BY-SA 2.0. Tom Brown was born around 1705 and raised in Yarm. His house at the south end of the High Street, built around 1480, is the oldest standing dwelling in what used to be the County of Cleveland. On 27 June 1743, at the Battle of Dettingen in Bavaria, Brown was a dragoon when his un...

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Image: Gordon Hatton | CC BY-SA 2.0