Newcastle: The Hill Station Above the Coffee Farms

Newcastle is a hill station high in the Blue Mountains above St Andrew, built in 1841 on the site of a former coffee plantation so that British troops could escape the yellow fever that was killing them in the lowlands around Kingston. It has been a Jamaica Defense Force training base since independence, and it still sits at the edge of the coffee country its name is tied to.

Why was a military station built at Newcastle?

In the early nineteenth century, yellow fever regularly devastated British regiments garrisoned around Kingston and Port Royal. Major General Sir William Maynard Gomm, commander of British troops in Jamaica from 1839, noticed that the disease was far less common at higher elevations. When the colonial government would not fund a mountain barracks, Gomm went ahead and built one anyway, on the grounds of an existing coffee plantation at Newcastle. The Board of Ordnance later authorized and took over the project. According to published accounts, the move worked: death rates among troops posted to Jamaica, once close to a virtual death sentence, fell sharply once regiments began spending time in the cooler mountain air. The change was not limited to Newcastle itself. Troops rotated in from garrisons across the island, and the mountain camp came to be seen as a workable answer to a problem the whole West Indies garrison shared, at a time when the cause of yellow fever was still not understood and altitude was one of the few defenses available.

From hill station to training depot

From the 1840s until 1959, Newcastle served the British Army as a "change of air" camp, a place where regiments rotated out of the fever-prone lowlands to recover in a cooler climate. In 1959 it became the training depot of the short-lived West Indies Federation's Federal Defense Force. When the Federation dissolved and Jamaica became independent in 1962, the barracks and surrounding land passed to the new Jamaican state, and the Jamaica Defense Force has used Newcastle as one of its main training bases ever since. Newcastle is described as one of the force's principal training grounds, and officer candidates still run its obstacle course as part of selection, a modern echo of the site's original purpose as a place to build fitness in the mountain air.

Where is Newcastle, and what surrounds it?

Newcastle sits inside the Blue and John Crow Mountains National Park, on the road that climbs out of Kingston through Irish Town and continues over the ridge toward Buff Bay. Trails from Newcastle lead up to Catherine's Peak and Mount Horeb, both popular short hikes, and the road continues past Newcastle up to Holywell and Hardwar Gap, the national park's main recreation area. The orangequit, a small Jamaican honeycreeper that favors shade coffee plantations as well as forest, is especially associated with Newcastle and the higher ground nearby; see birds of the Blue Mountains.

A few landmarks orient visitors within the settlement itself. The old stables building near the parade square marks the start of some of the local walking routes, including the Fern Walk, one of several short forest paths that begin directly from Newcastle rather than requiring a further drive into the park.

The coffee farms above and below Newcastle

Newcastle's own history begins on a coffee plantation, and coffee land still surrounds the settlement on several sides. Clifton Mount Estate, one of the older continuously worked coffee properties in the range, lies near Newcastle on the eastern slope of Catherine's Peak; see Clifton Mount Estate. Below Newcastle, the road back down toward Kingston passes through Irish Town, another village closely tied to Blue Mountain coffee. The pattern is typical of the range as a whole: cooler, higher ground given over to forest and, in Newcastle's case, a military base, with coffee worked on the somewhat lower and warmer slopes around it. Travelers moving between Kingston and the higher recreation areas around Holywell and Hardwar Gap pass through this same sequence in a single drive, from city, to coffee farm, to forest, in the space of a few miles.

Visiting Newcastle

The parade square at Newcastle, and its views over Kingston, are a well-known stop for people driving up to the higher parts of the Blue Mountains, and the settlement is a common starting point for hikes to Catherine's Peak. Because Newcastle sits inside the national park and remains a working military facility, current guidance on trails, access and conditions in the area is best confirmed with the Jamaica Conservation and Development Trust and, where relevant, the Jamaica Defense Force, rather than assumed from older accounts.