The Battle of Hilton

I'm currently reading Trevor Royle's Civil War: The Wars of the Three Kingdoms 1638-1660.  On the whole, I find the American Civil War much easier to understand than the English one, as the whole way of thinking back then seems to alien.  For instance, all armies seem, at first, to be fighting each other to protect the king, even when the king was leading one of the armies.  The comedian Mark Steel says in one of his books that after reading a history of the Civil War, he was sure something interesting must have happened, but he didn't know what it was.

This book gives a nice narrative to the period which other books I've read seem to lack, these others seeming to try to explain the politics and religious differences without going into much detail about what actually happened.  But one difficulty is that with so many members of the nobility fighting on both sides, you can get confused about who's who.  A character called Fred Smith could turn up but a few pages later his father is given a peerage and he becomes Viscount Dulwich.  Then the father dies and he becomes the Earl of Clackheaton.  And you do get descriptions where Essex is fighting in Surrey whilst Manchester is fighting in Lincolnshire.

The Royalist Earl of Newcastle, however, did make his base of operations Newcastle.  In 1643, Parliament persuaded the Scottish Covenanters to come to their aid and cross the border and march on Newcastle.  (It was the Scottish Covenanters not accepting Charles's attempts to impose the Anglican liturgy on Scotland in the 1630s that got the whole shooting match going.  The Scots didn't even want bishops.)

Unable to attack Newcastle, the Scots crossed the Tyne in 1644 and headed for Sunderland.  The two armies tried to manoeuvre round each other but, the book says, "on 24 and 25 March both sides had to engage when they clashed at Hilton outside Sunderland."  There is a map at the front of the book, and I looked to see where Hilton was.  It's a very small scale map, getting all of England on a two-page spread, but the only Hilton shown is in south-west County Durham, miles from Sunderland.

Checking on-line maps, I see there is a village called Hilton in that area, not too far from where I used to live although I don't recall ever going there.   streetmap.co.uk shows the Ordnance Survey map for the area and they usually mark sites of battles, but there doesn't seem to be one on it.

Googling the Battle of Hilton brought up a page on the Scottish wars that refered to the Battle of Hilton-Boldon.  (And googling Hilton-Boldon got me offers of stays in the Hilton Boldon Colliery.)  Martyn Bennett's historical companion to the English Civil War says the battle of Boldon Hills was over two weeks earlier.  There is a village called Boldon (or rather two, West and East) just north of Sunderland, but I can find no evidence there was ever a place called Hilton there, although Wikipedia does tell me that "bol" is Anglo-Saxon for Hill.

So, I wonder where the battle actually took place.

Also mention in the book was that among the Scots army was "Captain Frances Dalziel, bastard daughter of the Earl of Carnwath, the commander of a troop of horsemen who rode under the banner of a black flag sporting a naked figure hanging from a gibbet."  A female soldier in 1644?  I'd like to know more about her life, but a search on google turned up a blank.

(Incidentally, the American Civil War is supposed to have had an appreciable number of female soldiers.  Disguising yourself as a man and going off to fight was more exciting than waiting on the farm to be married off, and there were no medical exams done then,  I have a book on this subject working its way up my to be read pile.)