A NEW self-guided walking tour which can be made available on your mobile phone has been launched in the centre of Newport, revealing stories of the city’s heroes and villains.

Walkers can uncover stories including that of the Newport soldier who returned from the Boer War to kill his wife and the legendary warlord St Woolos who defended his church from pirates.

The tour was created by the HistoryPoints project which has created QR codes – codes which smartphones can scan and then download information – for more than 1,000 places of interest across Wales.

The voluntary-funded initiative already had their codes placed near the cenotaph and the Merchant Navy memorial by Newport City Council two years ago, meaning visitors could download details of the local war dead.

The “Heroes and Villains” tour runs between the two memorials and it is hoped local residents, school groups and visitors will all want to take the tour and discover the near-forgotten stories.

HistoryPoints.org was established in North Wales three years ago as a way to let groups and societies inform the public about their local history.

It brings history to people’s mobile phone, providing an instant snippet of history about buildings, memorials and other characters in the community.

Organisers of the Newport tour said the city’s history “abounds with tales of courage” including the Chartists, women involved in the Suffragette movement as well as the newspaper delivery boy who was the hero of the 1909 Newport dock disaster.

The QR-code weaves through the town, running between the Cenotaph in Clarence Place and the Merchant Navy memorial in Cardiff Road, at the south end of Commercial Street.

Other sites included in the tour are the Queen’s Hotel on Bridge Street and the Tom Toya Lewis pub.

Sean Amond-Steadman, manager at the Wetherspoons Tom Toya Lewis pub, has one of the codes printed out and stuck up in his windows as part of the tour.

He said: “I’m all for it. It will give people from all over Newport a reason to come back. Our pub’s hero is Tom Toya, the young lad who when the mines collapsed he climbed inside and helped some of the miners get out. Those he couldn’t free, he sat with and talked to.”

The tour can be started by scanning any of the codes along the route with a smartphone or tablet, or joining the tour online at http://historypoints.org and selecting "tours you can follow".