In this blog we explore some of the settlement outside of the Castle keep. The Castle Garth – the area around the Castle Keep. There were two main gates to Newcastle’s Castle, the West Gate, the site of which now stands on the Westgate Road in Newcastle, and the Black Gate – much more famous...Read More

The first thing to say about The Great Hall is that the name is a Victorian name. It wouldn’t have been called the Great Hall during the Middle Ages. That would have been another building outside of the Castle Keep. The Great hall, behind Newcastle’s Castle keep Where today’s Vermont Hotel is, the original Great...Read More

In this blog we’ll talk about the construction of Newcastle’s Castle as well as my favourite part of the building – the Well Room. The construction of a castle isn’t always about military defence. It’s not just the walls, the gatehouses or the military needs that make the castle into a defendable asset. Nor is...Read More

The cellar in Newcastle’s castle has also been known as the Garrison room. It was so called by a local antiquarian called John Collingwood Bruce. In those days, antiquarians were the people who, before historians and archaeologists existed, would gather together items, artifacts and stories from history and write books about them. John Collingwood Bruce...Read More

The Lower Hall would have been the office of the Sheriff of Northumberland. The Sheriff would have been known as a civil servant these days and he would have been the King’s representative in the North East of England, responsible for justice, collection of taxes, defence of the region, coordinating with the barons and Lords...Read More

Hadrian’s Wall on the Whin Sill, Northumberland Hadrian’s wall is an enigmatic frontier of the Roman Empire situated at the northern end of England and stretching from Wallsend in the east to Bowness-on-Solway in the west. While it is often viewed as the frontier to ‘separate the Barbarians from the Romans’, it was more than...Read More

The normal chapel at Newcastle’s Castle is a beautiful example of Normal architecture with Norman arches in the roof and above the doorways. These are incredible restorations undertaken by John Dobson in 1847. They still give you an idea of the chapel would have looked like during the medieval period. The Norman invasion When the...Read More

Henges, standing stones and stone circles – they’re ritual monuments from the late Neolithic, early Bronze Age period when Britain’s population experienced a huge change. That change was due to a huge influx of people coming to the British IslesRead More

Newcastle’s Quayside has a huge amount of history and heritage behind it. We’ll start here by going right back to the stone age. As the ice age ended, enormous amounts of glacial meltwater cascaded down what we now know as the Tyne Valley, channelling the landscape as it went. Sacrifices in the River Tyne During...Read More

Beneath the iconic Dean Street in Newcastle flows a little-known river.  The Lort Burn. The burn starts in two locations in the heart of Newcastle. The first tributary of the Lort Burn is the Victorian boating lake in Leazes Park which is one of the springs that sources the burn. The second tributary is where...Read More