By Thomas Bainbridge What might induce someone to leave their native homeland and travel thousands of miles across ocean and desert to a lawless and inhospitable… Read More »The Geordie Outlaw: Butch Cassidy’s Tyneside Roots
By Thomas Bainbridge Many well know the story of the Great Fire of London: Ignited in a baker’s oven in Pudding Lane, the blaze spread across… Read More »When Newcastle and Gateshead Burned: The Great Fire of 1854
By Thomas Bainbridge Newcastle is naturally wedded in the mind with coal. This connection would have been even stronger in the eighteenth century due to the… Read More »Coals to Newcastle: When a Fool’s Errand turned to Riches
By Thomas Bainbridge The capture of Charles I in 1646 portended the end of the First English Civil War. After having fled from the Royalist… Read More »Charles I’s Time in Newcastle Under House Arrest
The Town Under Puritan Tyranny in the 1650s By Thomas Bainbridge With the conclusion of the English Civil War in 1648, the Parliamentarian forces led… Read More »The Madness of the Newcastle Witch Trials
By Thomas Bainbridge The Tyne and Wear Derby is the most fiercely contested rivalry in English football. The two cities, thirteen miles apart, harbour a bitter animosity. But… Read More »The Origin of the Newcastle-Sunderland Rivalry
By Crasterfarian The Fort and Its Remains Benwell fort, or Condercum as it was known to the Romans, sits on the high ground to the west… Read More »Benwell Condercum and Its Unique Features
By Crasterfarian During various excavations of Hadrian’s Wall, it was assumed, due to dead reckoning of distance between milecastles, that Milecastle 4 was sited where… Read More »Milecastle 4 And The Gate That Never Was
To this day, no one really knows where the Vallum began. . . . This massive ditch formed a buffer zone to the south of… Read More »Is This The Start of the Vallum in Newcastle?
City Spirits Under Hadrian’s gaze,Rome’s distant child sprang,A bridge was laid down,With fort upon outcrop,Overlooking the work,By Neptune’s wharf and altar,Dogged burn cleft a town,From lort and sludge,To saturnine… Read More »City Spirits
