[1] Set beside the river in a wooded section of the Derwent valley, Blanchland is an attractive small village in the North Pennines Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty.

The Lord Crewe Arms Hotel has a vast fireplace where 'General' Tom Forster hid during the Jacobite rising of 1715.

W. H. Auden stayed at the Lord Crewe Arms with fellow student Gabriel Carritt at Easter 1930, and later remarked that no place held sweeter memories.

Writer Emily Elizabeth Shaw Beavan lived and wrote here when her husband worked at Derwent Mines.

[2] Blanchland may have been the model for the village in which was set the opening and closing scenes of Auden and Isherwood's play The Dog Beneath the Skin (1935).