A WRITER plans to travel thousands of miles on the trail of one of the North-East's great military heroes.

Newcastle-born Admiral Cuthbert Collingwood was second in command to Lord Nelson at the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805, one of the most celebrated battles in British naval history.

His memory lives on through a monument to him in Tynemouth and countless streets and pubs named after him.

Now, Max Adams, 41, of Bensham, Gateshead, has won a £7,500 fellowship from the Churchill Memorial Trust to produce a new biography of Collingwood.

Mr Adams, who used to head Durham University's archaeology unit, has published two novels on the Internet and presents a local history feature on Tyne Tees Television.

He said: "I will be following in Collingwood's wake, going to places he lived in or visited such as Minorca, Antigua, Boston, the US, Corsica and Sicily.

"I want to revive his reputation and give people in the region the chance to find out about him.''

Mr Adams became interested in Collingwood, who took command of the British fleet at Trafalgar after Nelson's death, while doing a television feature about him.

He said: "I found there was very little information on him. A biography was published in 1968, but it is out of print and I only got a copy from a rare-book shop in New Zealand.

"I thought that if I ever got the chance, I would put that right."

Mr Adams hopes to unearth information about Collingword, who was made a peer, and shed more light on his and Nelson's rivalry for the same woman, Mary Moutray, in the 1780s.

His book will be published by Newcastle Central Library in 2005, to mark the 200th anniversary of the battle of Trafalgar.