CORNFORTH, to the north of Spennymoor, should set you thinking of water and giant, flapping wings.

We say this, for the word would have originally been written, back in the eighth or ninth century, as the Corna-ford and translated into modern English this would be the ford of the cranes.

Today, any cranes visiting these shores are vagrants blown in by gales: the bird, once plentiful in the North, was finally driven to extinction in Britain in the 17th century.

However, in the Middle Ages they were a common sight: regularly served up at banquets along with swans and herons as a delicacy.

Typically, hunters caught the bird with falcons. In fact, one of the oldest letters to survive from England is a request from a king to a Continental bishop asking for two falcons with which to hunt Midland cranes.

And given that cranes can grow as tall as a small man, these falcons must have been powerful birds of prey.

But the greatest danger to the crane was not hunters.

Rather it was drainers, for as the marshes, the birdfs natural habitat, retreated in the North-East and elsewhere, so the bird was slowly pushed out of our island and names like Cornforth and several other towns and villages up and down the country, including Cranleigh in Surrey (the cranefs wood) or Cranham (the crane homestead) in Hampshire were left behind as fossils of an older, damper landscape.

But stand on the edge of Cornforth river today and close your eyes and perhaps you can just hear the slow beating of their giant wings.

Simon Young is an historian and author of AD500