Hepburn Bastle (NU071249)

© Copyright Russel Wills and licensed for reuse 

under this Creative CommonsLicence.

You don’t have to meander through the history of Northumberland for very long before you stumble over the terms bastle, pele tower and fortified house. The raiding Scots and the fraught inter-family feuding saw to it that anyone who had anything worth stealing would do their best to keep out the wandering baddies with the construction of these stone-built strongholds.

Hepburn Bastle, though, is a curious affair. Situated at the southern end of Chillingham Park, it has defied accurate categorisation since its (probable) late 14^th century creation. Described now as a ‘bastle’, it is more accurately a ‘fortified medieval tower house’. Though ‘tower’ is stretching it a bit, fortified it most certainly is. To complicate matters, buildings were added to it in the 16^th and early 17^th centuries – extensions which have since disappeared. Though it may have been built in the 1300s, it first appears in the records in 1509 as, simply, a ‘hold’, then pops up as a ‘tower’ in 1542, and by 1564 it is described as a ‘mansion house’.

Its dimensions are impressive. It measures 16.6m by 10.8m, is still three levels high despite being a ruin for an awfully long time and sports walls which are 2.7m thick at basement level. The ground floor comprises a barrel-vaulted basement with a later fireplace in the north wall – almost as if it was originally used (as in a bastle) to protect livestock, then later converted for human use – and at the east end a doorway leads to a mural chamber. The first floor has/had three rooms, each with a fireplace. The attic level, now minus its roof, has traces of fireplaces, windows and a window seat. Both the upper floors had their windows added after the Border region had quietened down somewhat – and were connected by a spiral staircase.

Though it is now known as Hepburn Bastle the original name was almost certainly Hebburn or Heburn – as is evidenced by its description in a 1715 survey as “a handsome house bellonging to Robert Heburn, esq.” (the ‘p’ was, we think, somewhat mysteriously introduced by the Ordnance Survey). The structure appears to have fallen from use around 250 years ago after the last Hebburn male heir died.

The Merry Widow of Windy Nook (NZ272610)

Mary Elizabeth Wilson, a resident of Windy Nook, Gateshead, for more than 40 years, had the dubious distinction of being the last woman to be sentenced to death in County Durham. The infamous serial killer was tried in 1958, but her sentence was commuted to life imprisonment and she died in Holloway prison in 1963.

Born in Hebburn in 1893, Mary will be forever known as the ‘Merry Widow of Windy Nook’. For many, many years prior to her misdemeanours she lived with her first husband, John Knowles, along with her lodger and lover, John Russell, in the quiet Gateshead suburb. When her husband died in 1955, she quickly married Russell; but within a couple of years he, too, was dead from ‘natural causes’.

Within months along came Oliver Leonard, who lasted less than a fortnight before leaving her £50 in his will. Mary then got herself hitched for a fourth time – almost immediately – to Ernest Wilson. She is alleged to have joked at her wedding reception that the left-over sandwiches could be saved for his funeral – and when poor Ernie died soon after, she supposedly suggested to the funeral director that she should be offered a trade discount. In fact, she did not even bother attending the fourth funeral – though she was handily bequeathed £100, a bungalow and an insurance pay-out.

Understandably, rumours then began to spread about Mary’s tendancy to lose husbands – four within three years – and the authorities eventually saw fit to exhume Oliver Leonard and Ernest Wilson in 1958. Traces of phosphorus pointed to the use of rat or beetle poison, and Mary was swiftly accused, tried and convicted of the murder of both men at Leeds in 1958. She was sentenced to hang at Durham, but due to her age (66) this was reduced to a life sentence.

Subsequent exhumations of her first two husbands also resulted in phosphorus being found, but Wilson died before she could be tried again.

St.Bede’s Well, Hebburn (NZ321641)

A nondescript hole in the ground in a corner of a patch of landscaped ground in Hebburn is the spot in question. Presumably an old natural spring of sorts, it used to sit little more than a yard from the old Bede Burn which meandered this way - a waterway which now lies buried under (or perhaps diverted around) the modern paved area which frames the well itself.

Legend has it that the famous Bede drew water from the well as a boy, and later sent monks there to fetch water when he was a priest at nearby St.Paul’s Monastery. All very fanciful, though there has been some recent speculation that the ‘bede’ in question derives from the Anglo-Saxon word baed, meaning a bathing place. Local historian Brand stated that in the 1740s it had long been a custom to bring sick and disabled children to the spot to be dipped in the healing waters, after which a crooked pin would be dropped into the little pool. Midsummer’s Eve would also bring the locals to the site in large number for various festivities, including bonfires, music, dancing and sports.

Until the urban spread of the late Victorian era, the well and its immediate environs were something of a beauty spot. The incursions of industry and the like changed the area beyond recognition as the Edwardian era blew in, and the site underwent many changes during the twentieth century – but has somehow managed to hang on to its place on the modern OS map as a site of antiquarian interest in the area now known as Campbell Park.

For an excellent picture history of the site, see here.

Name Changes and Funny Names (c.NZ360720)

The town now known as Whitley Bay seems as embedded in the popular culture of the North-East as any other place you care to name. It is as utterly distinctive to us locals for what it is and what is once was as anything else in the region’s rich history. And the splendidly named and beautifully formed landmark that is the Spanish City dome is unmistakable.

But the town’s name hasn’t always been as instantly recognisable. The name ‘Whitley’ goes way back, coming from the Old English wyt-leah, meaning ‘white meadow or pasture’; but it was for many centuries known simply as Whitley, and was a tiny place by today’s standards. In the Victorian era, however, it seems to have been known as Whitley-by-the-Sea, so as to distinguish it from Whitley Chapel and Whitley Castle in Northumberland. Then, in around 1902, the seldom used ‘by-the-Sea’ bit was dropped and replaced with ‘Bay’, allegedly to avoid confusion with Whitby in Yorkshire.

But wherever did the ‘Spanish City’ come from?

The answer is remarkably simple. In 1904, a merry band of entertainers known as the Toreadors Concert Party entertained visitors in an open-air theatre in Whitley Park. They had been brought there not from Spain, but from a few miles down the road by Mr Charles Elderton, who ran Hebburn’s Theatre Royal. For the occasion, the area was decorated in the Spanish style, and it became known as ‘the Spanish City’. It grew to be so popular that within a few years The Whitley Pleasure Gardens Company Ltd. was formed and a large fairground was established on the site. By 1910 the famous Dome was complete – in the Moorish style – and a legend was born.