Skulferatu #99 - West Walls, Newcastle upon Tyne

 

When you think of the walled cities in Britain, the ones that most commonly spring to mind are York and Chester, however many of the more ancient cities in the UK, like Newcastle, were at one time protected by a defensive wall.  As the old saying goes – ‘If walls could talk, what tales they would tell’, and at around seven hundred years old the town walls of Newcastle must have quite a bit of gossip for us.

 

Looking along the wall from the Chinese Arch

 

The town wall around Newcastle was built during the 13^th and 14^th centuries to defend the town from attack and occupation, during a time of hostilities between England and Scotland.  The wall was around two miles long, varied in height from fourteen feet to twenty three feet and was surrounded by a defensive ditch.  There was a parapet on top of the wall, seventeen towers, six main gates, three side gates and seventeen water gates at the Quayside, allowing access to the riverside. 

 

The West Walls

The West Walls

 

On several occasions the wall helped repel attacks by Scottish forces, but in 1644, during the Siege of Newcastle by the Scottish Covenanters, the wall was breached, and the Scots army took control of the city and surrounding area.  Once this conflict was over, the walls were repaired and strengthened.  They were further strengthened during the Jacobite Rebellions in 1715 and 1745, as it was feared that the Jacobite troops may invade.  However, they didn’t and in the subsequent peace the walls fell into disrepair with some parts being demolished, and others being scavenged for building material.

 

Morden Tower

 

The West Walls

 

Path running down the back of the walls

 

The Wall

 

Today, several parts of the wall remain, the best preserved of these can be found in the west of Newcastle, in the Chinatown area.  Several of the wall towers still stand, these being Herber Tower, Morden Tower, Ever Tower and Durham Tower. 

 

Morden Tower

 

Morden Tower was for many years a famous literary hub and was used as a venue where many poets and writers came to give readings of their work.  Those giving readings there included Allen Ginsberg, Seamus Heaney, Carole Anne Duffy, Ted Hughes, Roger McGough, Derek Mahon, Brian Patten, and Stevie Smith.

 

Durham Tower

 

All in all, you’re just another stone in the wall

 

On my walk around the walls, I made my way down to Durham Tower, which is one of the most intact of the original towers.  There, I left the Skulferatu that had accompanied me in a gap in the cement between the stones, underneath one of the windows.

 

Skulferatu #99

 

Durham Tower

 

Skulferatu #99 in a gap in the tower wall

 

Skulferatu #99 in a gap in the tower wall

 

Skulferatu #99 in a gap in the tower wall

 

Map showing location of Skulferatu #99

 

The coordinates for the location of the Skulferatu are –

 

Latitude 54.971149

Longitude -1.620655

 

what3words: class.slick.bronze

 

I used the following sources for information on the West Walls –

 

Co-Curate - Newcastle Town Walls

 

Historic England - Town Wall, Newcastle

Skulferatu #98 - Dog Leap Stairs, Newcastle upon Tyne

 

There is a steep drop from the centre of Newcastle to the riverside area.  This means there are lots of steep roads and steep stairs.  In fact, there seem to be an endless number of stairs taking you up or down.  There is even a set of stairs that starts in the middle of nowhere and ends suddenly, having gone nowhere.  So, if you ever fancy going on a keep fit weekend, don’t waste your money on a gym or spa break, just come to Newcastle and run up and down the stairs.

 

Set of stairs leading nowhere

 

Dog Leap Stairs are one of the most well known in Newcastle and lead from the Side, near the Quayside, to the Castle Garth, an open area by the Black Gate, which was part of Newcastle Castle.  Though the name of the stairs conjures up images of dogs leaping and made me think there had to be some exciting story of bravery and courage by some scrawny mutt, it appears the origin of the name is not that exciting.  It probably came from the term ‘dog-loup’ which referred to the way the stairs curve around, making them resemble the shape of a dog’s hind leg.

 

Entrance to Dog Leap Stairs

 

Street sign for Dog Leap Stairs

 

Dog Leap Stairs

 

Dog Leap Stairs was once the scene of a dramatic chase.  In the late eighteenth century, Bessie Surtees, the daughter of a wealthy Newcastle banker, met and fell in love with a young trainee cleric called John Scott.  However, Bessie’s father didn’t think much of John, or his prospects, so forbade them from meeting in an effort to kill off their romance.  But of course, love doesn’t work like that, and Bessie and John secretly planned to run off together.  On the night of November 18, 1772, Bessie climbed out of her bedroom window and met John, who was waiting outside.  As they made their escape on horseback, legend has it that they were spotted, and chase was given.  With a bit of encouragement, John managed to persuade their horse that a gallop up Dog Leap Stairs was just what it needed, and up it went, leaving their pursuers behind.  The couple then made their way to Scotland, where they were married.  They later reconciled with Bessie’s family and had a long and happy marriage.  Despite Bessie’s father’s doubts about John and his prospects, John proved him wrong by going on to become the Lord High Chancellor of Great Britain and the Earl of Eldon.

 

View from halfway up the stairs

 

View from Dog Leap Stairs

 

View of the Black Gate from the top of Dog Leap Stairs

 

Unlike John Scott’s horse, I didn’t gallop up the steps, rather, with my old and somewhat knackered knees, I managed to stumble my way up to the top of the stairs.  Then I stumbled my way back down again.  On my way back down, I left a Skulferatu in a conveniently sized hole in the brick wall running up by the steps.

 

Skulferatu #98

 

Skulferatu #98 in a conveniently sized hole in the brick wall

 

Skulferatu #98 in a conveniently sized hole in the brick wall

 

Map showing location of Skulferatu #98

 

The coordinates for the location of the Skulferatu are –

 

Latitude 54.969343

Longitude -1.610039

 

what3words: gallons.shins.worker

 

I used the following sources for information on Dog Leap Stairs –

 

Sunniside Local History Society - Newcastle Place Names

 

Sitelines - Dog Leap Stairs, Newcastle

 

Wikipedia - John Scott, 1st Earl of Eldon

Skulferatu #97 - High Level Bridge, Newcastle Upon Tyne

 

Newcastle has always been a part of my life.  I used to have a lot of family down there, so visited often.  I still like to head down two or three times a year and have a wander around. 

 

For those unfamiliar with the city of Newcastle, it sits on the north bank of the River Tyne in the north east of England and is considered to be the capital of the area.  It grew up, around and over the Roman settlement of Pons Aellius, flourished and expanded during the fourteenth century as an important site in the wool trade, and then played an important role in the UK’s coal industry.  With the decline of its docks and the coal industry the city suffered like many other northern towns and cities, though through various regeneration projects it now has a diverse and thriving economy.

 

When I’m in Newcastle, one of the walks I like to do takes me over the High level Bridge, a double decker bridge with a railway running over the upper level.  From this bridge there are amazing views over the River Tyne to the iconic Tyne Bridge and several other bridges across the river.  There are also great views of the riverside areas of Newcastle and Gateshead.

 

View over the rooftops to the High Level Bridge

 

View of the High Level Bridge

 

View of the High Level Bridge

 

View from the High Level Bridge to the Tyne Bridge and beyond

 

The view over Newcastle from the bridge always reminds me of a story Grandpa Nosferatu told me, probably because it is not that far from the area where he once lived.  Grandpa Nosferatu was born and brought up in the slums of Newcastle in the early part of the Twentieth Century, and as a young boy he lived with his family in a dingy, cramped house in the terraces by the docks.

 

My Grandpa’s father was a brute of a man who ruled his family with extreme violence. A man who terrorised his wife and children and expected them to obey his every word.  Basically, he was a big, nasty, aggressive bully.  As a kid Grandpa Nosferatu had learnt quickly that you never went against what his father said, or there would be dire consequences.  One of the many rules and stipulations that his father had was that his children never played in the docks. However, this was one rule Grandpa Nosferatu couldn’t help breaking, there was just too much fun to be had down there.  The place was a playground heaven for kids, what with all the boxes to climb, reels of rope, and various bits of junk lying around that just cried out to be played with.

 

One evening, a six or seven year old Grandpa Nosferatu headed down to the docks to meet some friends, climb boxes and play at being sailors. However, his friends never turned up. This did not deter my grandpa, who sat on top of one of the many boxes pretending that it was his ship, and he was the captain. He was suddenly disturbed out of his play by the noise of an argument. He shimmied down from the box and sneaked round to see what was going on. From a safe vantage point, he saw three men. Two were arguing with the third.  As the argument escalated the two men began to push and punch the third man. Then one of the men pulled out a knife and stabbed the third man several times.  He collapsed, lifeless, to the ground.  For a while the two other men seemed at a loss as what to do.  After some discussion they dragged the third man’s body to the edge of the dock and rolled him over into the swirling, dark waters of the Tyne.  They then hurried away, looking nervously around as they went.  My grandpa ducked down and hid for what felt like hours, too terrified to move in case the men came back and saw him.  Eventually, when he had plucked up enough courage, he left.  For a while he walked the streets in shock and facing a huge dilemma, did he go and tell the police what he'd seen and risk the wrath of his father, or did he keep quiet? The thought of his father being in a rage was so terrifying that he decided to keep quiet about what he had seen and for many years he never told a soul about the murder he witnessed at the docks.  And he really only ever told the story to highlight just how scared he had been of his father.  A fear that drove him to walk out of the family home at the age of fourteen and never return.

 

Anyway, back to the bridge.  The High Level Bridge was commissioned in 1845 and Robert Stephenson, the renowned engineer and son of the famous inventor George Stephenson, came up with the design for it. The stipulations he was given for the bridge were that it was to carry a railway, roadway, and a pedestrian walkway.  In order to avoid having to build a very wide and very expensive bridge, he designed it to be on two levels.  The lower level consisted of a road and two walkways, one on either side of the road, while the upper level carried the railway.  Work then began on the construction of the bridge with houses on each side of the river being demolished.  Piles were then driven into the riverbed; the approach viaducts were constructed and the ironwork was cast and put in place.  In total over 5,050 tons of iron were used in the building of the bridge and around 1.5 million bricks.  The cost of its construction, including the costs of building the approaches to the bridge and compensation to the families whose houses had to be demolished to make way for it, was estimated to be around £491,000, which translates in today’s money as being around £46 million.

 

The bridge was opened in 1849 by Queen Victoria and was considered to be ‘one of the finest pieces of architectural ironwork in the world.’ 

 

‘The Busy Tyneside’ – Tuck’s Postcard

 

Over the years, the High Level Bridge has undergone several renovations and upgrades to ensure its continued use and safety. In 2008, the bridge was refurbished at a cost of £40 million, which included strengthening work and the replacement of several components.

 

Newcastle entrance to the High Level Bridge

 

Iron Pillars

 

Graffiti skull and suit on the bridge

 

My heart belongs to ...

 

A view along the pedestrian walkway

 

The High Level Bridge – Gateshead view

 

Today, in the howling wind, I walked over the bridge and took in the views.  I then left the Skulferatu that had accompanied me on my walk in a ledge in the ironwork, high above the Tyne.

 

Skulferatu #97

 

Skulferatu #97 on a ledge in the ironwork of the bridge

 

Skulferatu #97 on a ledge in the ironwork of the bridge

 

 

Map showing the location of Skulferatu #97

 

The coordinates for the location of the Skulferatu are –

 

Latitude 54.967402

Longitude -1.609099

 

what3words: fact.grab.hotel

 

I used the following sources for information on the High Level Bridge –

 

Tourist Info at Site

 

Network Rail – The History of the High Level Bridge, Newcastle

 

 

Skulferatu #95 - Southern Necropolis, Caledonia Road, Glasgow

I journeyed through to Glasgow on a day with clouds so low, stiff, and grey, that it looked almost as if the world had been wrapped in a pauper’s shroud of old.  An oppressive shroud of gloom that seemed to deaden all the colours of everything in the city.  As I left the train station, people rushed on by, heads down, and the snarled traffic beeped and belched along the road.  Heading down the busy streets I made my way across the Clyde and into the Gorbals area of the city, where the streets seemed almost empty.  Walking past block after block of newly built flats and houses, I ended up in an area of run down and tired looking flats and tower blocks.  There, I found the place I was looking for, a place I’d been meaning to have a wander around for a long time, the Southern Necropolis.

 

The Necropolis Gatehouse

 

A view down towards the entrance to the Southern Necropolis

 

Gravestones and skeleton like trees

 

The Southern Necropolis, like its more famous counterpart the Glasgow Necropolis, is a graveyard best described as a ‘city of the dead’.  It was opened in 1840 and over 250,000 people are buried there.  It is the resting place of many of the richest of Glasgow’s inhabitants as well as many of its poorest.  Though most of those interred there are now long forgotten, there is one name that will be familiar to many due to the product that carries his name.  That being Thomas Lipton, the man who brought the world Lipton Tea.  

Thomas Lipton was a Scottish entrepreneur who was born in the Gorbals in 1848 and spent his early life in Glasgow.  After a few years of travelling and working in the USA, he returned to Glasgow and set up a chain of grocery stores there.  By the turn of the century, he had built up a chain of over three hundred stores throughout the UK and was a very rich man.  He then got into the tea trade and conquered the American market, making himself a multi-millionaire in the process.  

Thomas was a great self-publicist who made friends in the highest echelons of society, including both King Edward VII and King George V.   However, he led a life of contradictions, as despite being quite a hard-nosed businessman who was also known for his flamboyant lifestyle, he was also deeply committed to philanthropy and was a vocal advocate for the welfare of working-class people.  He also had a reputation as being a bit of a ladies' man, something he also tended to promote himself as, but it appears likely that he was gay. He lived for nearly thirty years with a long-term male companion, William Love, who had been one of his early shop assistants, and when that relationship ended, his preference was for the company of young men.  

Thomas was a tireless innovator who was always looking for ways to improve his products and business practices.  He was also an important figure in the development of the modern grocery store.  On his death in 1931, he left most of his fortune to the city of Glasgow.

 

Fallen gravestone with face of Christ

 

A weather worn and crumbling Jesus

 

Gravestone and trees

 

Ivy and moss

 

A field of gravestones

 

Gravestones with a background view of the high-rise flats at Caledonia Road

 

In 1954 the graveyard was the scene of a rather bizarre event.  In late September of that year a rumour spread through the local schools that a seven-foot-tall vampire had strangled two little boys in the cemetery and then eaten them.  Now, you may laugh at their gullibility in believing this, but hark back to your own childhood and the wild rumours that would run through the school.  I remember as a child back in the early Seventies, I was at Primary School and the rumour went round that there was a tiger in the boys' toilet. Being five or six we all believed it, so much so, that one of my classmates ended up pissing his pants rather than risking going to the toilet.  When the teacher demanded to know why he hadn’t asked to go to the loo he told her he didn’t want to be eaten by the tiger. Who told you there was a tiger in the toilet?  She demanded to know. John - my classmate blubbered out the culprit's name.  John come here; how dare you tell lies. Whack, whack, whack.  That’s pretty much how schooling went back in Scotland in the Seventies.  A few weeks later there was a rumour that our teacher had killed one of the boys in our class for some minor misdemeanour.  There’s a knife covered in blood on her desk, one of my little chums told me and pointed to a knife on her desk with red smears on it.  When one of the girls burst into tears and asked the teacher not to kill her, it was pointed out by the teacher that her knife was in fact covered in strawberry jam, as she’d been having her breakfast of toast and jam earlier that morning in the classroom.  She then whacked some other unfortunate who she suspected to have spread the story round.

 

Anyway, getting back to 1954 and the rumours about the child eating vampire in the graveyard, the kids in the Gorbals didn’t run away crying, no, they decided to do something about it.  So, hundreds of them armed themselves with penknives, sticks and stones and descended on the graveyard to hunt down the monster.  They searched around the gravestones, behind the trees and bushes and rushed shouting at any shadow they saw.  As the crowds of children grew in number, concerned members of the public began to phone the police.  One of the first officers to arrive on the scene was Constable Alex Deeprose.  He arrived expecting to find some youths causing a bit of trouble and was shocked instead to find hundreds of terrified children who clung to him and told him about the ‘vampire with iron teeth who just had to be killed.’  He soon felt like the Pied Piper of Hamelin there were that many children following close to him and crowding around him.  Concerned parents then started coming up to him and asking if there were any truth to the rumours.  He tried to reassure everyone that there was no vampire and with the help of other officers cleared the cemetery.  However, bands of kids carried on patrolling the streets, only heading home when it began to rain.  For the next two nights, gangs of children found their way into the graveyard to carry on the hunt for the vampire.  Eventually though they tired of this and found something else to do instead. 

 

The vampire was not forgotten so quickly though by those seeking an explanation to how a tale like this could have so quickly gripped the imagination of so many children.  Some academics and politicians quickly latched on to the American ‘horror comics’ that were popular at that time, blamed them for ‘polluting’ the minds of the young and demanded that they be banned.  However, other academics and social commentators pointed out that no monster matching the vampire could be found in these comics, but rather a similar one was mentioned in the Bible, in Daniel 7:7, a ‘dreadful and terrible’ beast that ‘had great iron teeth’, and another was mentioned in a poem taught in local schools – ‘Jenny Wi’ the Airn Teeth’ (Jenny with the iron teeth).  But, at the height of a moral panic no-one tends to listen to the voices of reason and the call for the ban on the comics was taken up by the local MP for the Gorbals, Alice Cullen.  In 1955 legislation was passed, banning the so called ‘horror comics’, the video nasties of their day.

 

On my visit to the graveyard today I saw no signs of anyone approaching seven foot tall and certainly no one with iron teeth.  Apart from one dog walker the place was empty, just me, the birds singing in the trees, and the buried remains of a quarter of a million people.

 

Urn and gravestone

 

A graveyard view

 

Iron and stone – grave of Isabella Wilson and numerous others

 

Tree exploding from old gravestone

 

I left the Skulferatu that had accompanied me on my trip, in a gap in the patterned carving on a faded and crumbling gravestone.

 

A faded and crumbling gravestone

 

Detail of the faded and crumbling gravestone

 

Skulferatu #95

 

Skulferatu #95 in hollow a in the outer pattern on the gravestone

 

Skulferatu #95 in hollow a in the outer pattern on the gravestone

 

Map showing location of Skulferatu #95

 

The coordinates for the location of the Skulferatu are –

 

Latitude 55.842726

Longitude -4.246083

 

what3words: drain.tests.luxury

 

I used the following sources for information on the Southern Necropolis and the Gorbals Vampire –

 

Southern Necropolis, Gorbals City of the Dead

southernnecropolis.co.uk

 

iNews

Thomas Lipton: from a Glasgow slum to yachting with kings

 

Daily Mirror – Saturday September 25^th 1954

 

Edinburgh Evening News - Saturday 25 September 1954

 

Aberdeen Evening Express - Friday 1 October 1954

 

BBC - Child vampire hunters sparked comic crackdown

BBC News - Scotland