A short and little used circular walk takes you past the home of William Backhouse, a member of the Darlington banking family which began to colonise the wilder extremes of Weardale in the early 19th Century. The Backhouses were awarded national medals for planting trees in the poor quality soils of the fell at a time when there was a timber shortage due to the Napoleonic Wars. Hamsterley forest has its roots in their plantings.
As Quakers, the Backhouses had no time for trivial pursuits like music or dancing. So they went out walking, and began wondering about the nature around them.
William's dad had a fine collection of grasses and mosses (sadly it was destroyed by fire when he loaned it to a friend); William himself started collecting birds. He had 347 of them, shot mostly by himself around the county, which he stuffed, studied, measured and painted.
Then, in the 1850s, he moved onto daffodils. Each morning, he would hybridise them in his glass porch, meticulously noting every action, before riding to the station at Wolsingham for a train to Darlington and a hard day's banking.
William, bored with the bog standard yellow, wanted more daffodilic drama. He wanted more colours; he wanted a big trumpet that would give an enormous blast when spring was arriving.
It all came together for him with Weardale Perfection which, as the new booklet Wolsingham: Gateway to Weardale says, had "a large white perianth (the petals fanning around the central cup) and a very pale primrose trumpet of immense size... some measuring five inches across".
When William died in 1869, his collection was sold to the "Daffodil King", seedsman Peter Barr of Covent Garden in London. Barr counted 192 new distinct varieties of daffodil which made William one of the greatest daffodil pioneers.
William's eldest son Charles continued to work with the bulbs at St John's (still a private residence). His youngest son Robert moved to Herefordshire and wowed daffodil enthusiasts with his orange and red award-winning cups. In 1925, he astounded the horticultural world by finding the Holy Grail of the daffodils: a flower with a pink cup and white perianth. Obviously derived from Weardale Perfection, he named the new champion Mrs RO Backhouse after his late wife who was herself a renowned daff-ist.
In all, according to the Royal Horticultural Society, the Weardale Backhouses (there was yet another William, who went to live in Patagonia in Argentina where he bred red-trumpeted daffs, pink pigs and a new kind of wheat which revolutionised farming in South America) created 430 varieties of daffodil - a huge crowd, a veritable multicoloured host.