"My parents originated in North Staffordshire," says Apedale farmer Barbara Pepper, aged 80.

"Father came from Shraley Brook and my mother was an Audley girl. My sister and brother were born here, but I was born in Alfreton in Derbyshire, when father bought a fleet of buses there. Later my dad sold the buses and bought a garage in Morecambe. I had cousins at Newcastle who I visited and where I met my husband Amos."

Amos Pepper's family had farmed Apedale's Home Farm since the 1930s after the Heathcote estate was sold off and the magnificent Apedale Hall was shamefully demolished.

"Amos and I married in 1948 and came to live at Home Farm with his family," Barbara continues.

"Farming was hard work for a newcomer. But I adapted and got to love it. When Amos died I carried on with the help of my son Royston who runs it now."

Royston came into farming early.

"I've seen so many changes that have passed unbelievably quickly," the 57-year-old livestock farmer tells me.

"Probably mining has caused the biggest transformation with literally the whole of the land being penetrated by hundreds of drift mines and foot-trails.

"You'd see miners disappearing into holes in the ground and coming up with barrow-loads of coal. And you'd watch the bagman collecting it along the lanes in trucks, paying for it on the spot. It was quite primitive. I remember miners working in candlelight in low drifts even in the 1960s."

There were deep mines as well, consolidated during nationalisation in 1948. By then Heathcote's Burley Colliery was already closed. Holditch and Parklands and Bullhurst survived by taking over other seams.

"Coppice moved to Banktop only in the 1970s, and Colin Powell's pit moved to Silverdale in the 1980s," says Royston. "After which the whole land was subjected to opencast mining. Even then there were still a few drifts operating into the 1990s. Apedale Colliery was a drift mine sold off in 1969, after which it operated as a private mine for a while.

"The problem was that once the seams were worked-out the land was left in a mess, whether it was through bad roads or subsidence. They didn't care."

T hrough all this turmoil Home Farm and its neighbours kept going. Royston remembers how the valley looked when he was young.

"The canal that went to Newcastle had been filled-in, but I remember water in it near to Burley Pools, one of which was called Blue Lake. Little mines were everywhere. Miners would dig into a seam and when all the coal was taken from it they'd just close the entrance and dig another. The land below was like a honeycomb.

"I remember driving a tractor across a field when suddenly a huge hole opened-up in front of me. This happened a lot. Subsidence has changed the land contours in my lifetime. Even the Hall Road, once leading to Apedale Hall, is still almost impassable."

Apedale Hall was a seat of the Heathcote family. By the end of the 18th century they'd become paired with the wealthy Edensors of Derbyshire, and in due course married into the equally wealthy Gresleys. And it was all because of coal and iron ownership. It was Richard Edensor Heathcote (1789-1850) who built Apedale Hall in 1826.

In 1934 the entire estate was auctioned piecemeal. "A sales catalogue shows how big Heathcote's holdings were," says Royston, producing auction lists covering locations in Chesterton, Halmerend, Alsagers Bank, Wood Lane. Where has it all gone?

"There was a notable Newcastle baker who took some of the building material from the demolished hall to build his own home," says Royston.

"People were given permission to come and remove what they wanted."

Home Farm's top field opens up some of the best views in the county.

C loser though, is the resourceful Apedale Park, planted to bury the opencast scars and the compressed drift mines that shared the land with tenant farms.

"The other change is climate," concludes Royston. "Every year, without fail, we'd be cut off by snow for weeks on end. Now we don't see snow at all."