CONSIDER the name ‘Coatham’, today part of western Redcar and once a market town with a proud, independent history of its own.

We do not know how old Coatham’s name is: though it certainly dates back long before the 12th century and our earliest written records. In that reference the name is, at least, though written correctly as Cotum.

Now Cotum in antique English was simply ‘the Cottages’ or even ‘at the Cottages’. But what does this actually mean?

Well, first of all we have to strip away the present surroundings.

This little community would have been built on a desolate strip on the edge of the sand-dunes in the Middle Ages – there was no busy Redcar off to the side, because Redcar was a houseless marsh back then.

As to that word ‘cottage’, forget hollyhocks.

At the very best there was something approaching what we think of as a thatched roof, for the medieval ‘cottages’ here had one room that the resident families would have been expected to share with their animals.

None of these medieval ‘cottages’ here or elsewhere survive – at best archaeologists find traces of rotted wood in the soil – for the simple reason that they were made of mud and daub plastered over branches.

Today we repaint our houses every few years. When the Cottages were first created, you simply rebuilt the whole house in an afternoon off work.

And as for work – the few cottage dwellers at Coatham would have been fishermen, feeding their families and their masters with the bounty of the North Sea.