Have a good look at this castle. This is our origins.

It’s located in Newcastle upon Tyne in England.

The city of Newcastle in England was named after this medieval fortification.

And our city, of course, is named after Newcastle in England.

Nowadays you can visit the castle and “step back in time”. It costs £6.50 to enter for an adult. Not a bad price, that.

“Newcastle Castle is where the city forged its development, identity and significance in British history,” the website newcastlecastle.co.uk said.

“Two buildings – the Castle Keep and Black Gate – miraculously survive and are open to the public following a £1.67 million Heritage Lottery-funded refurbishment.”

Visitors are urged to ponder the “changing face of the castle through the ages: from royal fortress and border stronghold to grim dungeon and teeming slum”.

The original fortification of the site was more than 1800 years ago in Roman times.

It was built to guard the bridge over the River Tyne as part of Hadrian’s Wall.

“The fort was abandoned and fell into ruin when Roman rule in Britain ended in around the year 400,” a history of the site said.

“By the 800s, the site of the fort was being used as part of an Anglo-Saxon church with an attached cemetery.”

This may have belonged to a settlement, which writers of that era named Monkchester.

In 1066, the Normans invaded and conquered England.

Then in 1080, the son of William the Conqueror – Robert Curthose – built the first castle on the site.

This was a timber fort called “Novum Castrum Super Tynam”.

A century later, King Henry II ordered this to be replaced with a stone castle named the “Castle Keep”.

This structure stands today and largely dates from this period.

Building continued through the reigns of the kings Richard, John and Henry III, until the Black Gate was completed in 1250. It consisted of an arched passage with guard chambers and was part of a defensive entrance for the castle’s north gate. 

The Black Gate was the last major part of the castle to be constructed.

“At the end of the 1200s, a long series of medieval wars between England and Scotland began. Newcastle became a border fortress and a place where the King of England would gather his armies before going out to fight.”

The castle began to decline in importance with the building of Newcastle’s town walls. By the days of Queen Elizabeth I, it was described as “old and ruinous”.

In the 1600s, parts of the castle were leased out and people began to build houses and shops in the “Castle Garth” – an area within the old walls.

But the castle was part of the English Civil War. The Siege of Newcastle occurred in 1644 and the castle “again became a defended stronghold”.

“By the 1800s, the Castle Garth was a bustling community full of slum housing, cobblers shops, taverns and a large Presbyterian meeting hall.

“Most of this was demolished to make way for the building of the railways in the 1840s, gradually revealing the medieval remains.”

In October 2011, the Old Newcastle Project received lottery funding to renovate and renew the Black Gate and the Castle Keep.

The two buildings were linked together as one site, which was named Newcastle Castle. The site reopened to the public in 2015. Topics hasn’t been to the site, but it’s definitely on our bucket list