Heritage
WallQuest board, The Roman Bridge
An information board on the corner of Bridge Street and Hillgate, a few steps from the Swing Bridge, on the Roman bridge that gave Newcastle its name, the medieval bridge that replaced it, and the Roman finds from the river.
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| Address | Corner of Bridge Street and Hillgate |
|---|---|
| Open to the public | Yes |
| Confidence | C · confirmed |
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Where it is
NZ 2532 6364 OS grid · 54.96681, -1.60604
The board, headed “The Roman Bridge across the Tyne at Gateshead”, was put up by WallQuest, a community archaeology project on “Hadrian’s Wall and its legacy on Tyneside”, funded by the Heritage Lottery Fund with Tyne & Wear Archives & Museums, Earthwatch and others. It begins: “You are standing close to the site of the bridge that gave Newcastle its Roman name – Pons Aelius, meaning ‘the bridge of Hadrian’.”
It shows an artist’s impression of the Roman bridge as a stone-arched bridge like the excavated one at Chesters, an engraving of the 13th-century bridge lined with houses, the 1872 drawing of a pier’s timbers thought to be Roman, medieval and Georgian, and the altar to Oceanus and the inscribed slab found in the river. A “Did you know?” panel tells of the Roman settlement found on the Hilton site above Bottle Bank. The whole story, checked against the excavation records and the museum’s catalogues, is on our bridges page: two of the board’s details don’t quite match the records there, the year of the dig and how firmly the radiocarbon date settles the bridge’s site.
The web address on the board, hadrianswallquest.co.uk, no longer works.
- The board itself, photographed by Andy, October 2026
- Andy, on the ground (location)