The City
Anyone arriving by train from the north will get a sneak preview of the Castle (daily: April-Sept 9.30am-5.30pm; Oct-March Tues-Sun 9.30am-4.30pm; GBP1.50), as the rail line splits the keep from its gatehouse, the Black Gate, on St Nicholas' Street. A wooden fort was built here on the site of an Anglo-Saxon cemetery - which itself had been dug into the site of the Roman fort of Pons Aelius - by Robert Curthose, illegitimate eldest son of William the Conqueror, but the present keep dates from the twelfth century. Staircases and rooms, including a bare Norman chapel, lie off a draughty Great Hall, where displays relate to the Civil War siege of 1644 by a Scottish army supporting the Parliamentarian cause; a small museum room shows various archeological finds. There's also a great view from the rooftop over the river and city. Little remains of the outer fortifications except the Black Gate, added in 1247-50 and topped by a seventeenth-century house. Further along St Nicholas' Street stands the Cathedral (Mon-Fri 7am-6pm, Sat 8.30am-4pm, Sun 7.30am-noon & 4-7pm; guided tours Easter-Sept Wed 11am; free), remarkable chiefly for its tower - erected in 1470, it is topped with a crown-like structure of turrets and arches supporting a lantern. Inside, behind the high altar, is one of the largest funerary brasses in England, commissioned by Roger Thornton, the Dick Whittington of Newcastle, who arrived penniless and died its richest merchant in 1430. Much of the interior was given a neo-Gothic remodelling in the late nineteenth century under Sir George Gilbert Scott.
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