The stumpy red and white tower of Souter lighthouse is on the edge of the North Sea between Newcastle and Sunderland. Before the lighthouse was built, 20 ships ran aground on the nearby beaches and rocks in 1869 alone. Souter opened two years later, the first lighthouse in the world powered by electrical alternators.

It was decommissioned in 1988, and is now surrounded by acres of green rather than coal mines. Souter is an atmospheric place for students to learn more about light, sound and electricity.

The lighthouse can take up to 100 pupils at a time, but not all in the tower at once. Inside, a good model reveals the layout of the whole complex. The keepers and their families lived in five attached cottages. They were paid extra for dealing with the hazards of electricity and tolerating the noise of the foghorn, which had its own separate station.

The compass room is on the ground floor. There pupils can send signals, using semaphore, Morse code or special maritime signal flags. And they can get the lighthouse keeper’s view from a remote camera at the top of the tower. This camera can be adjusted to look in any direction - at birds, ships, or other members of the party exploring the cliff-top.

Then it’s up the steep stairs for the most exciting part of the visit. Here 1,008 prisms rest on a ton- and-a-half of mercury. Lit by a smallish 4,500 watt bulb, they can deliver 1.5 million candle power. The size and complexity of the honeycomb of prisms is astonishing. So is the ease with which they turn through 360 degrees. The lighthouse has had some modification, but the powerful intermittent beam that reached 26 miles out into the North Sea is still in working order.

Souter also aided coastal navigation with constant red and white beams, directed south towards Sunderland, and you can see these too.

There’s the fascinating foghorn, with its two rock-concert size loudspeakers, so loud that now it is only allowed to roar on special occasions. In the old days it was so noisy and insistent that the keepers called it “The Wife”, which probably tells you more about the keepers than their wives.

Souter lighthouse and its surroundings make a perfect key stage 1 and key stage 2 outing, although the younger pupils are too small to climb right to the top of the tower. Slightly older pupils will enjoy another testament to the scientific curiosity and spirit of innovation that once flourished in the prosperous North East.

William Armstrong was a wealthy Newcastle gun-maker and ship-builder who determined to make himself a house that would be the last word in Victorian modernity. He moved north-west of Newcastle and built a mansion, Cragside - almost a castle.

It was on a magnificent site near the village of Rothbury in Northumberland. The hillside was a little bare, so Armstrong planted 7 million trees. He was that sort of man.

Armstrong wanted a labour-saving house, so he harnessed the Debden Burn in 1865 for the water power he needed. He dammed the flow and pumped the water up to the Basin Tank, above Cragside. From there it was gravity-fed down to the house, where it provided hydraulic power for the lift and turned an ingenious roasting-spit in the big kitchen.

He wanted electric light, so he built the world’s first hydro-electric plant in the grounds, using a turbine and a dynamo. The Power House, as it was called, was manned by the Caretaker of Electric Light, who took his instructions by phone from the butler in the Cragside pantry.

By 1879 Armstrong had arc lights in his house, and by 1882 modern incandescent bulbs. He even installed electric dinner gongs around the house.

Cragside is spacious and elegant, with magnificent gardens. But it is primarily a monument to the Victorian application of science to making everyday life more convenient - for servants as well as masters.

Woolsthorpe Manor, the comfortable 17th century farmhouse in Lincolnshire where Isaac Newton was born, is very different. Although the house is bare, it suggests very well the cosy yeoman-farmer background Newton came from.

Now only some graffiti on the wall, and the battered apple tree that once forcibly awoke Newton to the power of gravity, remain to remind us directly of him.

The chief interest of a visit to Woolsthorpe lies in an excellent science centre housed in an outbuilding. There volunteers take primary school children through a series of lively experiments.

They can swing a pendulum, time its movement and learn that the speed of its swing is affected by its length. Pupils can grasp how Newton’s reflecting telescope was a huge advance on the refracting variety. They can see how centripetal force works, with the aid of an exciting whirligig which throws bean bags around. On the most popular hands-on interactive machine, pupils drop different sizes of metal ball from a fixed height to see if they reach the ground at the same time.

Woolsthorpe gives a powerful sense of the kind of man who was born here on Christmas Day in 1642. Newton had a world-changing period of scientific creativity in his twenties, eventually finding his way to Cambridge and a European reputation. But he remained modest. As he once said: “If I have seen further it is because I have stood on the shoulders of giants.”

KS2 are the main visitors to Woolsthorpe, but potential scientists of all ages, and lots of non-scientists, will enjoy it greatly.

ContactSouter Lighthouse, Coast Road, Whitburn, Sunderland. Tel: Sara Dunnett, 0191 529 3161. Cost: NT Education Group membership is the best bargain, otherwise pound;1.15 per child and pound;2.30 per adult. Cragside House, Rothbury, Morpeth. Tel: Jenny Drummond, 01669 620333. Cost: NTEG membership recommended; also extra charge of pound;1 per child. Woolsthorpe Manor, Newton Way, Woolsthorpe-by-Colsterworth, Grantham. Tel: 01476 860 338. Cost: NTEG membership recommended, or pound;1.70 per child and pound;3.50 per adult. Web for all three: www.nationaltrust.org.uk