Whitehills

Rising above the urban landscape of Gateshead, this high point on the ridge between the Tyne and Team valleys sits on the very eastern fringe of the North Pennines. It serves as a popular local lookout, offering a clear, industrial-edged panorama of the Tyneside skyline, the North Sea, and the distant Cheviots.

• •The name 'Whitehills' likely originates from the Old English for pale or 'white' land, a term often used by early farmers to describe ground covered in bent-grass or cotton-grass, which appeared lighter than the surrounding dark heath.
• •Standing at the summit, one can look north across the Tyne to see the silhouette of the Cheviot Hills on a clear day, while the more immediate foreground is dominated by the sprawl of Newcastle and the Angel of the North to the south-west.
• •The area around the hill is a mixture of modern housing and the Windy Nook Nature Reserve, a site reclaimed from former sandstone quarrying that once provided the building material for many of Newcastle's Victorian streets.
• •Navigating to the top usually requires more attention to street signs than sheep tracks, making it one of the few 'peaks' in the region where you can bag a summit and a pint of milk in the same ten-minute window.