Geograph - photograph every grid square

There seems to be no valley involved in the small settlement of Gurney Valley; the word appears simply to be part of a place name and in no way descriptive. The settlement is little more than a single terrace of houses lying to the north of another small place, Coundon Grange.
The blue and yellow road sign is in a style commonly found in County Durham; there's a particular proliferation of such signs in the area between Bishop Auckland and Shildon.

Additional information added June 2017, received from an interested party: - There was development here of rows of houses originally called Gurney Villas, a reference to the Norfolk origins of the family of the landowner's wife. There was a number of terraces along the hillside but in the Category D village 'clean up' the settlement was renamed Gurney Vale then Valley, (for no known reason), and most of the rows were demolished.