Background : Upper Redesdale During the eighteenth century and
for much of the nineteenth, the whole of upper Redesdale was
contained within the parish of Elsdon. This was an enormous
parish of in excess of 77,000 acres that had been divided up for
administrative purposes into seven townships. According to
Hodgson, with the exception of Ramshope, an extra-parochial
district, the townships had been named after principal areas of
settlement. Only the three most northerly of these historic
townships are in the present Northumberland National Park -
Troughend, Rochester and Ramshope, but they contain around two-
thirds of the acreage of the original parish. On the east, the
townships were bordered by the North Tyne parishes of
Bellingham, Thorneyburn and Falstone, on the west by the
Coquetdale parishes of the Chapelry of Holystone and the Parish
of Alwinton, while to the north lay Scotland. The Park does not
contain all of the original Troughend township, but it is
important to begin any historical survey from the