Housebuilding started over the North Walbottle Romano-British Enclosure
13th Jan 2025
Pictures taken by Geoff Brown of Chapel Park
Housebuilding has started over the North Walbottle Romano-British Enclosure, opposite Abbey Grange. Historic Environment Record number: 1318. During the Iron Age this land contained at least 40 roundhouses.
The site has been fully excavated for prehistoric finds and a number of objects were discovered.
Romano-British farmsteads often seem to occupy spots approximately one mile north of the Wall…
This site sits atop a dyke and is not far from where the ‘Ponteland Stone’, one of the oldest pieces of rock art in Northumberland, was originally situated at Birney Hill, High Callerton.
The Ponteland Stone: decorated with the mysterious cup & ring grooves found throughout the Atlantic fringe of Europe and with great density in Northumberland and Scotland. This now sits in the garden of the Hancock Museum. 3D model is by antiquary, Kenneth Lymer on Sketchfab. pic.twitter.com/rAdEguXuoG
It is necessary that the city can expand, but perhaps this specific field could have been conserved and made into a focal point of heritage parkland for future generations. This is something the contiguous conurbation extending west from Chapel Park is going to lack, along with any kind of front street or square, school, pubs, transport links and other key pieces of community infrastructure.
Never miss an article. Enter your email or give our FB page a like
Penbal 1 – Lee Stoneman
No air-built castles, and no fairy bowers,
But thou, fair Tynemouth, and thy well-known towers,
Now bid th’ historic muse explore the maze
Of long past years, and tales of other days.
Pride of Northumbria!—from thy crowded port,
Where Europe’s brave commercial sons resort,
Her boasted mines send forth their sable stores,
To buy the varied wealth of distant shores.
Here the tall lighthouse, bold in spiral height,
Glads with its welcome beam the seaman’s sight.
Here, too, the firm redoubt, the rampart’s length,
The death-fraught cannon, and the bastion’s strength,
Hang frowning o’er the briny deep below,
To guard the coast against th’ invading foe.
Here health salubrious spreads her balmy wings,
And woos the sufferer to her saline springs;
And, here the antiquarian strays around
The ruin’d abbey, and its sacred ground.
Jane Harvey
From ‘The Castle of Tynemouth. A Tale’ (1806)
No air-built castles, and no fairy bowers,
But thou, fair Tynemouth, and thy well-known towers,
Now bid th’ historic muse explore the maze
Of long past years, and tales of other days.
Pride of Northumbria!—from thy crowded port,
Where Europe’s brave commercial sons resort,
Her boasted mines send forth their sable stores,
To buy the varied wealth of distant shores.
Here the tall lighthouse, bold in spiral height,
Glads with its welcome beam the seaman’s sight.
Here, too, the firm redoubt, the rampart’s length,
The death-fraught cannon, and the bastion’s strength,
Hang frowning o’er the briny deep below,
To guard the coast against th’ invading foe.
Here health salubrious spreads her balmy wings,
And woos the sufferer to her saline springs;
And, here the antiquarian strays around
The ruin’d abbey, and its sacred ground.
Jane Harvey
From ‘The Castle of Tynemouth. A Tale’ (1806)
