Penshaw Monument was built in 1844 as a half-sized pastiche of the Theseum in Athens. Dating from an age when landmarks were built to the vanity of landowners and glory of patriotic heroes rather than at the behest of council bosses and government quangoes, the monument was paid for by public subscription and designed by the local architects John and Benjamin Green - who were also jointly responsible for Grey's Monuments and the Theatre Royal in Newcastle -in honour of John George Lambton, Earl of Durham, former ambassador to Russia and the first Governor General of Canada. The sandstone edifice stands 100 feet long, 53 feet wide and 70 feet high, a grand folly of 18 Greek Doric columns, each almost 7 feet thick, raised on a stone platform, and entirely open to the elements between its imposing end pediments.
It's a steep 100-step dirt and wooden riser climb to the top of the hill. Clambering up the base, just over a metre above ground level, you stand between columns blackened by industrial dirt, their bases spattered with graffiti that grows less imaginative with each passing decade. Down below, on either side of the steps up the hill, the remains of the ramparts from an Iron Age fort ring the grass, though some still say the marks were caused by the legendary Lambton Worm as it slept coiled round the hill.
The view from the hollow column in the south east corner of the monument looks out over a flat landscape stretching 450 metres down and several miles across to the North Sea, a white ferry reflecting the early evening summer sunlight as it moves silently past Seaburn, clumps of high rise buildings to the south encircling Sunderland city centre, and the browns and yellows of newly cultivated land stretching beyond the waste high scrub land up on the hill.
Further to the north, tracing the coastline up towards the Tyne, the matchstick like Cleadon Water Tower tops a hill over to the east, marking the border of a panorama along the banks of the river, the distant shipyard cranes overlooking half-hidden suburbs, all fronted by the light-grey corrugated factory units of Washington, Nissan's huge pre-fabricated buildings and the sprawling green landscape of Washington Wildfowl & Wetlands Trust.
West are the rounded hills of Durham, misted by the slowly setting sun, stringing themselves out towards Lambton Castle and Chester-le-Street. The flat land in the foreground is covered with dark green tree cover faced by steadily encroaching rows of semi-detached homes, still and orderly except for the occasional car and the repetitive melody of a lone ice cream van.