Olive Linge and the story of Mary, Queen of Scots, in Durham

It is a dark unprepossessing stone, not really worth a second glance.

It juts about a foot above the ground and is covered in moss, but if it does get a second glance, with a little imagination, you could perhaps make out that it was once covered in carvings that have weathered away over the centuries.

The stone in the shadows in the shrubbery outside Willington library in 2017 (Image: Unknown)

In 2017, Olive Linge spotted the stone re-emerging from the overgrowth.

She had been quietly keeping an eye on it since at least the 1970s when the railway which had run beside it was dismantled.

She was insistent that Memories have a look at the stone because, she said, there was a great story about how in 1568 Mary, Queen of Scots, rested her royal derriere on it after being driven out of Scotland.

Olive Linge with her display commemorating the 100th anniversary of Willington lad Capt George McLean winning the Victoria Cross, another of her favourite stories (Image: Unknown)

Olive has just died, aged 97.

Her whole life was lived in Willington and her sons, Kenneth and Nigel, have worked out that bar the occasional holiday, she spent all her 35,000 days in the small town, living at six addresses.

Olive Linge as a young girl (Image: Ken Linge)

In 1944, when she was 15, she met Donald Linge, who had been called up from Suffolk to work in the mines – a “Bevin Boy”.

They fell in love, and married at Sunnybrow church on December 27, 1948.

They honeymooned in Suffolk and then made their first home together in South Street, Willington, next to a slaughterhouse.

On a miner’s wages, times were tight: Donald used his carpentry skills to make the two boys toys; Olive knitted them jumpers.

In the 1960s, the family moved into Luxmoore Avenue, a former council show home.

Olive tended the garden and, even after Donald’s heart-breaking death in 1979, it was her forever home.

When the developers came and demolished the rest of the Dene Estate, Olive stood strong, refused to sell, and hers remained the only house in Luxmoore Avenue, with her own postcode, and all the new properties crowded around her oasis of colourful plants.

The Miners’ Welfare Hall in its heyday (Image: Olive Linge)

Nearby was the Miners’ Welfare Institute, and she watched with dismay as it fell into decay.

Miners’ Welfare Hall, Willington, boarded up in 2016 (Image: Unknown)

She felt strongly about the decline of the community values on which it was based, and she was extremely concerned about the fate of the plaque inside it which commemorated the 20 men and boys killed in the 1896 Brancepeth Colliery explosion, a tragedy that touched so many families in Willington.

Olive Linge at the unveiling of the Brancepath Colliery A Pit disaster memorial plaque at Beamish Museum in 2017 (Image: Beamish Museum)

Without her, the plaque would have been lost, but she persuaded Beamish Museum to take it and was guest of honour when it was unveiled in 2017.

The Miners’ Welfare Hall burns down in 2022, after Olive had rescued the plaque (Image: Unknown)

Olive wrote four books about Willington, gave talks and slideshows about its history and put on exhibitions in the library.

She was the keeper of the town’s secrets and the teller of its stories.

Like the one about the Mary, Queen of Scots.

Mary, Queen of Scots (Image: Unknown)

Mary came south, hoping for sanctuary from her first cousin once removed, Queen Elizabeth I, and from friendly, Catholic faces in the north.

This story says that she stayed awhile in Newcastle, and was invited by the Neville family, who owned Raby Castle and Brancepeth Castle, to stay at their Willington Hall.

Olive’s old books noted how Mary “crossed Spennymoor and rested awhile by an old stone which had been set up to mark the track over the moor”.

However, Mary, who had her own claim to the English throne, was seen as a threat by Elizabeth who had her arrested in Carlisle in May 1568. She was imprisoned in Bolton Castle in Wensleydale before, in January 1569, being moved to Tutbury Castle in Staffordshire.

This triggered the Rising of the North, when Catholic nobles gathered at Brancepeth Castle and occupied Durham Cathedral in support of Mary.

Their rebellion failed, Mary was executed in 1587, and the stone where she rested became overgrown.

However, the story was never forgotten, and in 1856 when the Bishop Auckland to Durham railway was built, the stone was rediscovered.

Willington railway station, from Kenneth Linge (Image: Kenneth Linge)

Whether the railwaymen moved it is not known, but the old books say they “embedded (it) near the pavement by the road to the (Willington) railway station”.

In Olive’s days, her corner of County Durham changed enormously. In 1964, Willington station closed, followed, in 1967, by the district’s last colliery at Brancepeth, which only a decade earlier had employed 2,200 men.

The pathway following the line of the trackbed through the site of Willington station with the library on the left (Image: Unknown)

In 1971, the railway and station were dismantled. The trackbed was converted into a walkway and cyclepath, and on November 6, 1975, a small library was opened on the station site.

A pathway was laid from the main street to the library and a little shrubby area was planted up around the old stone which Olive kept her watchful eye on, delighting in 2017 when a spring pruning operation revealed it once again in its full – if rather underwhelming – glory.

Olive died on August 14, but the stories that she cherished live on.

• Olive’s funeral is at Wear Valley Crematorium at 12.30pm on Tuesday, September 8.