Forums: Northumberland

In just three hours of savage, face-to-face fighting in a Northumberland field, 15,000 men lost their lives in the most brutal of ways. The scale of the butchery in 1513 at the Battle of Flodden, near the village of Branxton, is astonishing in an age well before the mechanised killing capabilities of modern artillery. At the end, the Scots King James IV, most of his accompanying nobility and 10,000 of their countrymen lay dead. Now the first steps have been taken to plan how this momentous battle's 500th anniversary should be marked in just over four years' time. For the...

Nearly a thousand new archeological sites have been discovered off the North East coast as part of an English Heritage-funded project... Among the results were four ship wrecks found in mud flats off the coast of Amble. Their existence had previously been recorded, but until the survey took place their exact location was not known. However, it is not known when the wrecks date back to, but they are clearly visible on aerial photographs from the 1940s. And on the Farne Islands, a pattern of rectangular features around the medieval St Cuthbert's Hermitage can be seen. It is believed that...

An otter has survived a "perilous" three-mile sea crossing to the Farne Islands for the first time, the National Trust has said.The animal, more commonly found in rivers, has swum from the coast of Northumberland despite rough seas.While otters in Scotland do live in coastal areas, Mr Steel said it was "a rare event" to see them by the sea in England.For one to reach an island three miles offshore was, he said, "incredible". "It is staggering that an otter could survive the perilous journey out to the Farne Islands, especially Brownsman, which is a long way from the mainland,"...