Agricultural History Review, Volume 58 Part 2 (2010), p. 289

Bellingham is close to where the river Rede meets the North Tyne, and behind the High Street lies an extensive area of sheep pens and sale rings that formed the livestock market, or ‘mart’ as it is more commonly called in Northumberland. There thousands of sheep from the surrounding hills were sold every year, until 1 October 2004, when the last sale, which forms the subject of this DVD, was held. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as railway branch lines spread across rural Northumberland, Bellingham was part of a network of livestock markets, with counterparts in the neighbouring small towns. The town’s market was established in 1861, but by the middle of the twentieth century several of the smaller markets in the district began to close as motor transport took over from the railway, the post-Second World War expansion of Kielder Forest took over the land previously devoted to sheep-rearing, and new regulations favoured concentration on the larger markets such as the one at Hexham, further down the Tyne valley. Eventually Hexham and Northern Marts, the firm that owned both the Bellingham and Hexham markets, decided to close the smaller of the two.

The story presented here is a conflict between those who saw the decision as the sad end of an era and others who believed it inevitable, with several seeing it as both. There are interviews with farmers who sold their sheep at Bellingham for decades, with the auctioneers, and with a director of Hexham and Northern Marts who has a detailed knowledge of the history of the market and appears from time to time to put what is happening into historical context. It is a well crafted and clearly structured production that presents a vivid picture of what used to be an event of great local importance, and explains why it has disappeared.

From the wider perspective of agricultural history this DVD provokes two reflections. It is, as far as I know, the first non-print text to be reviewed in this Review. Does its use of old still photographs, and its account of why the market rose and fell in economic significance, raise the end result beyond a piece of primary evidence into a work of explanatory history? And if so, should we also review television history programmes, exhibitions, re-issued archive films, vintage machinery shows, museum displays, websites, e-books, or any other non-print format that attempts to shed light on the rural past?