Discover more and use Dukes Cottages in Newcastle as an ideal base to explore our region
Travelling to Newcastle
Offering scheduled flights throughout the UK and Europe, Newcastle International Airport is situated just 5 miles away from the city centre, the perfect touch down for tourists who travel to the city. You can travel on the Tyne and Wear Metro service to get downtown; it travels into Monument Station with the journey lasting around 20 minutes.
Other than the Metro service, you can also take the bus which runs through the village or a taxi cab to travel into Newcastle’s city centre.
Newcastle Train Station: There is a train service that runs from London to Newcastle train station there and back approximately every half an hour that also stops at Doncaster and Peterborough, the journey usually takes around 3 hours. Up the road Edinburgh is only a one and a half hour train ride away. There are also regular trains that connect the rest of the country including places such as Birmingham, Leeds, Bristol, Oxford, Manchester, Glasgow, York, and many others. A day trip to the historic city of Durham is highly recommended.
Tickets can be bought from any station on the day of travelling although if you are travelling fairly far to get to Newcastle you are advised to book as much in advance as you can to save on ticket prices.
Geordies
The term Geordie refers to someone who has been raised in and around the city of Newcastle and the accompanying counties of Tyneside. Many people would have heard this term being used to describe the followers and supporters of the Newcastle United Football Club as they are often labelled as Geordies by sport commentators and newspaper journalists. The known rivals of Newcastle United FC, Sunderland were once also known as Geordies, until football rivalry forced the Sunderland crowd to break away from the term in and around the late 1980’s, as they did not want to be associated with Newcastle in any way.
If you have never heard someone speak in a strong Geordie accent before it may come as a shock to you and you may find some words difficult to comprehend. Here we will give you some common examples of spoken terms used in the Geordie dialect: ‘alreet’ (alright) ‘hyem’ (home) and ‘nowt’ (nothing). A lot of the elements of this vocabulary have been inherited from Old English, where as the lower end of the country has updated to Standard English phrases, this could be because the north was not as affected by the Norman Conquest compared to how the south was.
There are a few arguments over where the actual term Geordie originally derived from, all of the theories have little evidence to be able to prove the true origin. Some say that it is because miners in the area used to use lamps named Geordie Safety Lamps that had been designed by George Stephenson around 1895, other mining communities in the surrounding area used Davy Lamps, which made a dissimilarity amongst the communities.
