After a winter of soul-searching and recriminations off the cricket field, Durham have produced a summer of dominance on it to win the County Championship Division Two title at a canter.

The recriminations came from a horrendous Headingley Saturday 12 months ago. Needing to bat out a possible 89 overs to avoid relegation, Durham were skittled for just 85 by Yorkshire as they went down by a single point to hand a huge reprieve to Hampshire.

A season which had begun with positive chat about challenging to win the Championship had ended in the worst possible manner.

Hard conversations were needed behind closed doors about what went wrong, but the north-east county carried that anger with them to correct their mistakes and get back to the top division at the earliest possible opportunity thanks to a 93-run win over Middlesex.

“Twelve months is a long time in cricket, a long time in sport,” head coach Ryan Campbell told BBC’s Test Match Special.

“We sat there in this club and did not panic. We worked through a few issues, we had some heated debates about a few things, the players took on board what we wanted to change and how we wanted to do things, so I’m really grateful to be back here and win the thing.”

There was no question about the quality within Durham’s ranks but the questions were about temperament and their ability to cope when put under pressure.

As such, Western Australian Campbell decided that it was time to get tough during the off-season and so the squad embarked upon the challenge of scaling Britain’s three highest peaks – Ben Nevis, Scafell Pike and Snowdon – within 24 hours.

“Basically we wanted to test the players mentally and put them in situations they didn’t really enjoy,” he said.

Campbell jokingly recalls the adventure as “absolute torture”, but the shared experience of facing up to adversity was one for everyone’s memory banks.

After a poor time on the field, the other kneejerk reaction can be to change everything, but the director of cricket Marcus North, head coach Campbell and crucially captain Alex Lees all stayed in post.

However, Campbell was firm in his belief in giving Lees more backing following a tough first year in the post after taking over from Scott Borthwick.

“It’s very easy to throw blame at the leaders when things are not going so well,” he said. “But I felt that we hadn’t supported him enough.

“We needed to create an extra layer for him, so Alex wasn’t taking on everything all day, every day. We put a leadership group together, which has worked out extremely well for us. That took a lot of pressure off Alex.

“We believe we have a very talented squad with batting and bowling, which everyone talks about. We had to get the best out of it but to come back the way we have, which has been pretty brutal at times, has been pretty pleasing to watch.”

After the capitulation at Headingley on the final afternoon of last season, final-day run chases in key home games with Lancashire and Northamptonshire, of 336 and 296 respectively, showed that Durham had learned the lessons of going after a game rather than sinking into their shells.

Those were probably the most dramatic of their nine wins in a season in which they have dominated the division.

David Bedingham was the top run-scorer with 1,029 runs before he headed home to South Africa, while Matthew Potts’ 58 wickets have him as the leading wicket-taker in county cricket this summer.

Emilio Gay hit three centuries in six matches before England came calling, while young batter Ben McKinney has also hit three big hundreds to demonstrate his potential.

Ben Raine has been his usual consistent self as a fine county performer and left-arm spinner Callum Parkinson has come to the fore since the Championship resumed after the summer break.

Drama and distraction has also circled around the club during the summer. Ben Stokes’ suspension from the England team for a Test in June, before his return and then eventual retirement from Test cricket and the England captaincy, created a circus.

Events in Derby city centre involving Brydon Carse following a win away to Derbyshire last month also provided unwelcome headlines.

Their absences from England have been Durham’s gain and Campbell has been happy to give players a platform to relax and perform, with Carse taking nine wickets in the title-clinching win over Middlesex.

“In a perfect world, you don’t want any distractions,” said the head coach. “But a sports team isn’t a perfect world.

“We feel like we’re a family here at Durham and when one of our family is in trouble, we put the wagons around and embrace them.

“Ben and Brydon, at the minute, they’re here and they’re happy. We’ll always support them.

“We didn’t know Ben was going to retire from Test cricket, we didn’t know Brydon was going to be left out of the one-day squad. They’ve been added bonuses, but we’ve embraced them and they’ve embraced us back.”