Housebuilding started over the North Walbottle Romano-British Enclosure
13th Jan 2025
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.
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.
Penbal’s View
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.
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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)
Photograph: Lee Stoneman
Photograph: 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)
