[1] As well as the town of Alston, the parish includes the villages of Garrigill and Nenthead, along with the hamlets of Nenthall, Nentsberry, Galligill, Blagill, Ashgill, Leadgate, Bayles and Raise.

[3] The manor of Alston or Alston Moor changed hands several times until the 17th century when it passed to the Radcliffe family who held the title Earl of Derwentwater, but after their part in the failed 1715 Jacobite rising their lands were confiscated by the Government, who assigned it to the Admiralty to support the Royal Hospital for Seamen at Greenwich in London.

The poet W. H. Auden was to travel a great deal in Britain and abroad, but it is the wild region between the River Tees and Hadrian's Wall which provides the backdrop to many of his poems and plays of the '20s and '30s, and echoes at intervals throughout his life.

In America in 1947, an Ordnance Survey map of Alston Moor hung on the wall of Auden's chaotic shack on Fire Island.

Close to the River South Tyne, 2 miles north of Alston, lies Randalholme Hall, a 17th-century house incorporating a fourteenth-century pele tower.

[4] To the south of Garrigill is the district of Priorsdale which was at one time regarded as separate to the rest of the manor of Alston Moor and was divided into the liberties of Eshgill or Ashgill, The Hill and The Hole which were further subdivided into other properties.

Priorsdale was so named as it was originally given to the Priors of Hexham Abbey but passed to the Crown after the Dissolution of the Monasteries who gave it to the Lawson family, though most of it eventually became part of the Greenwich Hospital estate.

When Sir Edward Radcliffe, Earl of Derwentwater bought the estate in 1629 for £2,500, the mines were believed to be virtually exhausted.

By the 1860s, cheaper imports were making the local lead industry unprofitable, and by 1896 the leases had passed to the Vieille Montagne company, who worked the mines for zinc, which had earlier been of little commercial value.