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COATHAM GRANGE is a derelict 17th Century farm to the north of Darlington beside the original trackbed of the Stockton & Darlington Railway. It is lost in farmland between Whessoe and Coatham Mundeville, its only access being from Patches Lane, an old drovers route which is now a popular footpath. As Memories 520 told, when the railway steamed through the countryside in 1825, the farm was called Myers Flat and the area was so boggy that all of the workings – the soil embankments and the iron tracks – just seeped away overnight as if fairies had stolen them. George Stephenson, though, defeated the fairies by devising a ground-breaking method of stabilising the land so the first steam engines could go over the bog. ....