Historic Places in North East

Corbridge Roman Town is the place to visit to find out how people lived, worked and worshipped near Hadrian’s Wall. Corbridge was founded well before Hadrian began building the Wall. It developed into the most northerly town in the Roman Empire, providing goods and services for the garrisons on Hadrian’s Wall. You can still walk the original surface of its Roman main street, flanked by the remains of town buildings. The museum at Corbridge showcases an internationally important collection of site-finds which bring the town and its people to life. Weapons, jewellery and personal possessions mingle with grave finds and images of the town’s many gods. Don’t miss the intriguing Corbridge Hoard, a Roman time capsule. Buried in the 2nd century AD, it includes amazingly well-preserved items from a Roman workshop, including armour and a Roman soldier’s personal possessions.

Cragside House in Northumberland is one of the most remarkable country houses in Britain, a Victorian Gothic mansion built between 1864 and 1895 by the industrialist and inventor William Armstrong on a rocky hillside above the Debdon Burn that was the first house in the world to be lit by hydroelectric power. Armstrong, who made his fortune from hydraulic machinery and armaments manufacture and became one of the wealthiest industrialists of Victorian England, brought the same inventive and systematic intelligence to his country house that he applied to engineering, creating a building of extraordinary technological ambition set within one of the most ambitious Victorian woodland gardens in the country. The house was designed primarily by Richard Norman Shaw in the Old English style, developed in stages across thirty years of building that added wings, towers and gables in a picturesque accumulation suggesting organic growth over centuries rather than a single patron's sustained building programme. The result is a building of considerable visual complexity that grows convincingly from its rocky hillside setting, its various rooflines and projections catching the light in ways that make it look different from every angle and in every season. The interior is among the finest surviving Victorian domestic settings in Britain. The library, the Owl Drawing Room with its extraordinary inglenook fireplace of marble and tile, and the dining room represent the Arts and Crafts aesthetic at its most complete and considered, every surface and fitting contributing to a total domestic environment of great richness. The hydroelectric system installed by Armstrong from 1878 onward, using the streams on the estate to power arc lamps and later incandescent bulbs, was a pioneering achievement in electrical engineering that anticipated the domestic electricity supply by decades. The estate includes one of the largest rock gardens in Europe, extensive Victorian plantings of rhododendrons and conifers and five purpose-built lakes feeding the hydroelectric system.

Finchale Priory (pronounced ‘finkle’) owes its origin to St Godric, a colourful figure born about 1070 who, after years of travel as a sailor, merchant and pilgrim, felt called to the solitary life. He eventually settled at Finchale, where he lived to the ripe old age of about 100. Some 25 years after his death, his hermitage became a priory. By the mid 14th century this was serving as a holiday home for monks from Finchale’s parent monastery, Durham. Finchale’s story can be read in its surviving remains, from St Godric’s original church and tomb to the Durham monks’ rural retreat. In late 1112 or 1113, while he was living in Durham, Godric heard of Finchale, a few miles downstream on the river Wear, and with the approval of the landowner, the Bishop of Durham, he settled there. His first hermitage was probably a mile or so upriver from Finchale – a spot now known as St Godric’s Garth – but he soon moved to the site where the ruins of Finchale Priory now stand. He was to remain there for the last 60 years of his life. Here he built himself a hut with a turf roof, and a chapel in which he had a crucifix, an image of the Virgin Mary, and a bell. His life as a hermit was severe. He often prayed immersed in cold water, either in the river or in a barrel set in the floor of his chapel. He fasted frequently, wore a hair shirt and chain mail, and slept with a stone as a pillow. As well as these self-imposed hardships, Godric was robbed and beaten by marauding Scots in about 1138, and narrowly survived a flood in about 1150 when the Wear burst its banks. In thanksgiving for this escape he built a new church dedicated to St John the Baptist, which he linked to his earlier chapel with a thatched walk or cloister. His life was not totally solitary, as his mother, brother and sister all came to live nearby within a few years of his arrival. Several notable individuals are said to have consulted him, including Thomas Becket, Aelred of Rievaulx and Pope Alexander III, and King William the Lion of Scotland visited him in person. Later in life Godric submitted to the authority of Durham Cathedral Priory, and as he grew more and more infirm, one or more of the Durham monks came to live with him. After eight years confined to bed in his little church, living on milk, and frequently depressed and irritable, Godric died, aged around 100, on 21 May 1170. He was buried against the north wall of his church, where his burial place is marked by a cross in the grass.

The crowns of England and Scotland were united in 1605 but full political union between their parliaments only occurred in 1706 and 1707, by two Acts of Union. From that time, the two countries were governed as one and, together with Ireland, formed Great Britain. English and Scots voted for the union, but it was not universally popular in Scotland, despite the potential economic benefits. Jacobite sympathies in Scotland and England resulted in the rising of 1715, which aimed to place James II’s son, also James Stuart (later known as the Old Pretender), on the throne. Although the Jacobite army took over a large part of Scotland, they achieved only stalemate at the Battle of Sheriffmuir (8 miles north of Stirling, in Scotland) on 13 November. The following day another Jacobite force surrendered to British government troops at Preston in England. The bloodshed and near success of the 1715 rising, the presence of Jacobite sympathisers in England, and the easy penetration of hostile forces as far as Preston, stirred the British government to prepare for more trouble. In the Scottish Highlands, though several barracks already existed, more were built as part of a wider counter-insurgency strategy. It also resulted in the new barracks at Berwick. Berwick’s strategic position, near the England–Scotland border and close to the main eastern road linking the two countries, meant that it had always been an important garrison town.