High Westwood

High Westwood is a village in County Durham, England, situated a few miles to the north of Consett, near Ebchester and Hamsterley.

Past and present

Once a thriving village with a colliery and coke works, High Westwood is now little more than a few private houses. There was a railway station on the Derwent Valley line from 1904 to 1942. The site of the former Westwood County Junior Mixed and Infant School is now a housing complex, where the houses are named after rows of colliery houses demolished in the early 1970s. There is also a row of six surviving bungalows. The school was built in 1879 and a centenary celebration held in 1979. The school was closed in approximately 2003. There is still a regularly used cricket pitch, although the football pitch and the other amenities are overgrown.

The village is now surrounded by countryside and the old railway line part of a country walkway. Nearby oak woodland still has deer and glades of bluebells, but the red squirrels vanished in the 2000s. Both barn owls and tawny owls are common, along with a wide range of smaller birds.