`Screaming brought forth the butler from the castle'.

For 250 years the Burdon family owned Castle Eden Dene and used it as their pleasure grounds.

Rowland Burdon, a member of the Company of Merchant Adventurers of Newcastle, bought the land at Castle Eden in 1757.

He rebuilt the village chapel, which became the Church of St James, and in 1765 began work on the family mansion, which became known as the castle.

His son, also Rowland, built the cast-iron bridge over the Wear, which was a wonder of its age.

In 1775 workmen came across a spectacular find which had been in a Sixth-Century burial. Known as the Castle Eden vase (pictured), the glass claw beaker is now in the British Museum.

In the early 18th Century two French refugees set up home in the dene and built a small cottage, living off fish and animals they could trap and the produce of their garden.

By the 1820s the dene was becoming a tourist attraction but the terrain could prove dangerous.

John Burdon described a visit by a party from Easington Rectory. "Among them was a dwarf, very much deformed, a protege of Lady Ravensworth. They had a cart with them and coming up the very steep little pitch above the culvert the horse jibbed.

"All jumped out except the dwarf, who was helpless in such an emergency.

"The cart fell into the channel of the stream and the screaming brought forth the butler from the castle, who rescued the dwarf from the stream.

"I found the butler with the dwarf in his arms, she screaming and his face the picture of horror. He, not knowing she was a dwarf, concluded that she had been doubled up into this higgledy-piggedly form by the injuries she sustained."

The dene was made safer by the creation of paths and in 1850 the Rev John Burdon allowed people to use the dene for a small charge.

In 1905 an 800ft, 10-arch railway viaduct was built, with a wooden footway on the side for pedestrians. In 1951 the dene was taken on by Peterlee Development Corporation and work began on opening paths.

English Nature assumed ownership in 1985, when the dene was declared a national nature reserve.