Ballast Hills Burial Ground welcomed visitors for Heritage Open Days on Saturday 19 September, with a full day of events exploring the people, stories, and working lives connected with this remarkable place.
The day began at Brinkburn Street Brewery with Everyday Histories at Ballast Hills, where visitors could explore some of the research emerging from the AHRC-funded Ballast Hills project. Our exhibition, Ballast Hills: Brewing, Burial and Everyday Lives, looked at the connections between brewing and the burial ground, tracing the people involved in growing, making, moving, and selling beer in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Newcastle.
Brinkburn also ran three brewery tours during the day. We do not have photographs from the tours, unfortunately, but they proved particularly popular and added another dimension to the story by linking the history of brewing with a working brewery in the Ouseburn today.
The focus moved to Ballast Hills Burial Ground during the afternoon for Explore Ballast Hills: Self-Guided Trail and Onsite Guides. Visitors followed the gravestone path, talked with our volunteer guides, and heard about some of the thousands of people buried at the site. The surviving stones offer only a glimpse of a burial ground that received more than 40,000 interments, but they provide a starting point for recovering the lives of people who might otherwise have disappeared from Newcastle’s history.
One of the pleasures of the day was seeing people stop, look closely at the stones, and ask questions. Ballast Hills can easily appear to be simply a green open space. Events such as Heritage Open Days give us an opportunity to make its history visible again and to explain why the site deserves greater recognition and care.
Later in the afternoon, Beneath This Ground brought music and poetry into the burial ground. The performance drew on themes of memory, place, loss, and the lives represented at Ballast Hills, with the audience gathering informally beneath the trees.
The day continued into the evening with Twilight at Ballast Hills: Stories along the Gravestone Path. Visitors moved through the burial ground as storytellers introduced some of the people whose memorials survive, placing individual lives back into the wider history of Newcastle.
Heritage Open Days also showed how much can happen when research, community involvement, local organisations, volunteers, and creative work come together. We are very grateful to everyone who gave their time, to Brinkburn Street Brewery for hosting us, and, most importantly, to everyone who came along and shared their interest in Ballast Hills.
The event forms part of our continuing work to research, protect, and raise awareness of this extraordinary historic burial ground.
