Where Art Meets Landscape

The mining community that became world-famous artists. Coal miners who picked up brushes and made art history — from a village hall to Broadway. Read their story →

Designated as England's most northerly National Park, covering 405 square miles of wild Cheviot hills, Hadrian's Wall country and Europe's largest dark sky park. 2026 marks seven decades of protecting this extraordinary landscape. Read their story →

Born in Bamburgh, Grace Darling became Britain's most celebrated heroine when she and her lighthouse keeper father rowed through a savage storm to rescue survivors of the SS Forfarshire. She was just 22 years old. Read her story →

Lancelot 'Capability' Brown, the greatest landscape gardener in English history, was born and raised in Kirkharle, Northumberland. He transformed over 170 estates including Blenheim Palace and Alnwick Castle's grounds. Read his story →

Besieged at least 13 times over 400 years. Edward I decided the Scottish succession here in 1292. Turner painted it more than any other subject across his entire career. Today it stands in quiet solitude above the Tweed — Read their story →

A Spanish emperor, African soldiers, birthday invitations, and 73 miles of stone. The story of the most heavily fortified border in the Roman Empire — and the extraordinary town where it all begins. Read their story →

For centuries, hare coursing was woven into the fabric of border life. Working men gathered on frozen fields with their greyhounds and lurchers. A tradition of skill, breeding, and fierce local pride — now outlawed, but not forgotten. Read their story →

King Edwin's seventh-century royal hall stood here, with a wooden amphitheatre unique in Anglo-Saxon Britain. Bede describes thirty-six days of mass baptisms in the river. Then in 633 it burned. Lost for a thousand years — found again by aerial photograph in 1949. Read their story →

On a summer morning in 793, Norse raiders landed on Holy Island and attacked the monastery. The shock reverberated across Christendom. Alcuin of York wrote: “never before has such terror appeared.” The Viking Age had begun. Read their story →

Northumberland has more castles than any other county in England. From Bamburgh's volcanic outcrop to Dunstanburgh's sea cliffs, these fortresses tell the story of a border county shaped by centuries of conflict, power, and survival. Read their story →

For three hundred years, the border families raided, burned, and stole their way through history. They gave us the words bereaved, blackmail, and gang. Their pele towers still stand. Read their story →

Cup-and-ring marks carved into stone millennia before the Romans arrived. One of the densest concentrations of prehistoric rock art in Europe — and nobody knows what they mean. Read their story →

Alnwick means farm on the bright river. Morpeth might mean murder path. Goswick means goose farm. Every road sign is a message from the past — in six different languages. Read their story →

Three kings lie buried beneath the Priory. Part of Northumberland for 1,300 years. Turner painted it, Homer was transformed by it, and Carlo’s ice cream van has been parked outside it for as long as anyone can remember. Read their story →

The Mauretania named it. 18,000 puffins nest offshore. From Bronze Age burials to coal port to harbour village with artists’ huts — Amble has reinvented itself more times than any town on the coast. Read their story →

Norman castle, Norman church, fortified bridge, chapel cut into a cliff — and a river that almost draws a circle around the lot. Hotspur was born here in 1364 and Shakespeare set Henry IV at his gatehouse. The Percys still own the keep, the Coquet still bends around it, and the medieval bridge gate-tower is the last of its kind in England. Read their story →

Douglas stole Hotspur's pennant outside Newcastle and dared him to come and get it. Percy pursued. They fought by moonlight. Douglas died. Percy was captured. It became one of the most famous ballads in the English language. Read their story →

Every significant castle in Northumberland on a visual timeline. From the Anglo-Saxon fortress at Bamburgh to the Tudor fort on Holy Island. 29 castles, a thousand years →