Archaeologists have found Viking sculptures at Gainford and several examples of these have been put on display in the Open Treasure exhibition at Durham Cathedral.

Today its main features are an unspoilt village green, a Jacobean hall and a Georgian street called High Row.

The village church of St Mary's, Gainford, stands on the site of an Anglo-Saxon monastery built by Bishop Ecgred of Lindisfarne in the early 9th century.

[2] Feeling slighted, the family immediately set about building themselves a house on their land with a 40-foot column erected next to the churchyard so it towered over the trees and pointed a huge V-sign in stone towards the church authorities.

There is an inscription on the west face of the shaft which states: In thankful commemoration of the sixtieth anniversary of the accession of Queen Victoria on June 20th 1897.

[4][5] The geographer Charles Bungay Fawcett (1883 – 1952), regarded as "one of the founders of modern British academic geography" and an early promoter of the idea of regional planning.