The county's remarkable and richly varied military architecutre, from Hadrian's Wall to Warkworth, contrasts with monastic ruins buried deep in the valleys of the Coquet and the Aln or standing proudly by the sea at Holy Island and Tynemouth. Newcastle upon Tyne has the most elegant nineteenth-century city centre in England. Elsewhere the distinctive smaller towns include Alnwick, dominated by its castle, Hexham with its priory, brick-built Morpeth, and Berwick-upon-Tweed, ringed with exceptional sixteenth-century fortifications. Great country houses range from Vanbrugh's theatrical Seaton Delaval to Sir Charles Monck's austere Belsay and Norman Shaw's romantic Cragside. Monuments of a great industrial past, as well as a wealth of smaller buildings, such as bastle houses (peelhouses or stronghouses unique to the Border country), are all vividly described in this revised guide to Northumberland's architectural pleasures.

William Roy was a polymath and a visionary. His work established the path that would lead to the formation of the Ordnance Survey and to all of the paper-based and digital mapping products that we use today. His story - very much one of the Enlightenment - demonstrates how one man's curiosity and diligence enabled him to excel across a diverse range of topics: military reconnaissance and intelligence; the lessons that could be learned from the past about the tactical use of landscape; the science of determining the height of mountains; and the development of a meticulous methodology to achieve an unprecedented accuracy in topographical measurement. In this biography, Humphrey Welfare uncovers the career and activities of this important figure, and in doing so paints a vivid picture of the inner complexities of 18th-century Britain.