A lost stretch of Hadrian's Wall has been discovered under a grandmother's garden.

Eileen Maas was delighted to learn she had the oldest garden wall in Britain - when archeologists identified masonry from the ancient barricade beneath her house.

The hidden stonework was uncovered when builders were digging a trench.

The 1,880-year-old wall ran directly under the front garden of Mrs Maas' home in Tunstall Avenue, near the Fossway in Byker, Newcastle.

She said: "I found out about the wall just two weeks ago when they first dug it up. It's really special and it's such a big part of our heritage so it's definitely something to be proud of.

"I even took a photo of it to give to my grandson because he is really interested in history."

For more than a century the wall, a World Heritage Site, lay undiscovered as building work went on around it.

Archaeologists found the original foundations of the 12ft high and 8ft wide wall, running parallel with the Fossway.

The wall, which runs from Wallsend to Bowness in Cumbria, was uncovered when developers Thornfield Properties wanted to build shops.

Tyne and Wear Museums archaeologist Jonathan McKelvey has been working on the site since the discovery two weeks ago. He said: "It's an important discovery because there are only a few uncovered bits of the wall in the North-East, but this is another part of the jigsaw.

"A lot of the wall has been demolished in this area so it's surprising that there is another bit surviving and it shows there is potential for finding more."

It is more than 100 years since this part of the wall was last seen, when houses were first built on Tunstall Avenue.

Mrs Maas said she was told by the builders that Hadrian's Wall passed

directly beneath the front garden of her three-bedroom semi-detached home at the end of the Fossway.

She said she did not intend to excavate the wall. "It can stay under the lawn," she said. "After all, it has come to no harm there up until now,"