we found pottery, glass, lead …and lots and lots of graves
I moved here 26 years ago and I was downsizing, I wanted a smaller house and I have found this a perfect place to live. It’s pretty, it’s next to the park, it’s quiet and my neighbours are lovely. I saw several houses but when I walked into this one, I felt a warmth from the house which I hadn’t felt anywhere else and so I just bought it.
Sheila in Northumberland Park © Hazel Plater
I spend a lot of time in Northumberland Park; I’m a volunteer gardener there and I’m on the Management Team as well. We put on lots of activities; bat watching, star gazing and in the summer, we have a big event, the Vikings come, generally, and we have lots of dancing and music, which is very nice.
They were having an excavation there to find St Leonard’s Hospice. Also, at the same time, they found the Norman Chapel, which was really lovely. That was built about, well after 1066, around 1080 maybe. A lot of it has been robbed out, but we found quite a lot of pottery, glass, lead, things like that and lots and lots of graves.
Most of the graves I think that we actually excavated were probably from the 1700 or 1800s. Easy to see, they obviously had coffins, we found coffin nails, but no wood of course. But the skeletons were very well preserved and we found an earlier one and he was slightly different. He was a very tall man and he had stones around his grave in a circle and he didn’t seem to have a coffin, so he was earlier. And then there were some earlier ones in the Chapel. These would have been perhaps nuns or monks. One lady I excavated was in the corner of the Chapel as you entered and she was old, her bones were very fragile. Then when you were excavating round the side outside of the Chapel, you found there were graves right next to the Chapel and there were bones inside, there were graves inside. It had been disturbed, there was a big area in the centre of the Chapel that had its tiles taken up and three bodies put in. Two bodies to start with and then they opened it up and put another one in and then put these lovely blue and cream tiles back on. And then, down the side of the bank going down to the road there were more bodies, more graves, but we didn’t excavate those because they were in the undergrowth. We excavated one side that had looked like they had buried two bodies together. Looked very friendly, but in fact it would have been one coffin on top of the other and the wood would have decayed so they looked as if they were in the same coffin, but they wouldn’t have been.
It was because the park was being regenerated and as part of that you have to have an archaeological assessment. They knew that was there, in the Victorian times they came across it and that was on a map. It wasn’t a very good map but at least in showed where the Hospital was supposed to be, but nobody really expected us to find the Chapel.
My grandson has moved here from London, said he’s glad he’s bought a house here in North Shields rather than at Whitley Bay, cos he said everything seems to be happening around here and, of course, the Fish Quay is really good now. So I just think it’s going to get a better place to live, with better facilities, sometimes they haven’t got the facilities they need. A lot of places are now having individual shops, these unique shops and we haven’t really got those in North Shields yet but hopefully that will come. They’ve really got some nice restaurants in North Shields now, so that’s a bonus.
I have a good life and I like living here, I think it’s a lovely place to live and I certainly wouldn’t move anywhere else.
Sheila was interviewed as part of the North Shields Voices Project