5 Days in York

York's city walls run for about 3.4 km around the old city, on Roman and Viking foundations, mostly rebuilt in the 13th and 14th centuries. They're the longest medieval town walls in England, and you can walk on most of them for free. If you only do one stretch, do this one: climb up at Bootham Bar, one of the four main gates, and walk east to Monk Bar, behind the Minster, with the cathedral rising over the gardens of the Deanery the whole way.

The gates are called bars and the streets are called gates. That's the first thing to learn in York. Come down at Monk Bar and walk along Goodramgate to Lady Row, a terrace of timber cottages from 1316, among the oldest houses in York, and slip through the arch beside them into Holy Trinity, a tiny medieval church with crooked box pews and 15th-century glass. It's free and almost always empty.

There's been a church here since 627, when King Edwin of Northumbria was baptized in a little wooden chapel, which is why the Minster is celebrating its 1,400th anniversary through 2027. The building you see took 250 years, from 1220 to 1472. Inside, the Great East Window, glazed by John Thornton in 1405-08, is the largest expanse of medieval stained glass in Britain, telling the story of the world from Genesis to the Apocalypse. Look at the choir screen with its row of fifteen kings of England, and the octagonal Chapter House, with no central pillar holding up its roof.

Downstairs, the Undercroft shows the Roman headquarters building on which the Minster stands, where Constantine was proclaimed emperor. Then climb the Central Tower, 275 steps, for the best view in York.

The Shambles was the street of the butchers. The word comes from shamel, the bench they sold meat from, and you can still see the wide window sills and the hooks under the eaves. The timber-framed houses lean so far over the street that people upstairs could almost shake hands across it. It's the most photographed street in York, and today it's mostly sweet shops and Harry Potter shops. No, it wasn't the model for Diagon Alley, whatever the shops say.

The street's real story is Margaret Clitherow, a butcher's wife who hid Catholic priests here when that was a capital crime. In 1586 she refused to plead at her trial and was pressed to death under a door weighted with stones. She was made a saint in 1970, and a small shrine on the Shambles marks the house where she's said to have lived.

Have lunch at the Shambles Market behind it, which has a food court of street-food stalls. Then get lost in the snickelways, the tiny alleys and passages between York's streets, given their name by a local writer in 1983, a mix of snicket, ginnel and alleyway.

Bettys was opened in Harrogate in 1919 by a Swiss confectioner, and in 1937 he opened this one on St Helen's Square, fitted out like the ocean liner Queen Mary, which he'd sailed on. During World War II, the bar downstairs was the favorite of the bomber crews based around York, and hundreds of them scratched their names into a mirror with a diamond pen. The Bettys Mirror is still there.

Order a Fat Rascal, a big, warm fruit scone with a face of cherries and almonds, with a pot of Bettys' own tea. Or do the full afternoon tea, with sandwiches, scones and cakes, if you're not saving yourself for dinner.

Go back to the Minster for Evensong, the sung evening service of the Church of England, at 5:30pm from Tuesday to Saturday and 4pm on Sundays. You don't need a ticket and you don't need to be religious: sit in the choir stalls, near the singers, and listen to the choir fill the building as the light goes. It's the best way to experience the Minster, and it's free.

York calls itself the most haunted city in Europe, which is a marketing line, but it gives you the best evening entertainment in town. Several ghost walks start every evening in the center, from the Original Ghost Walk, running since 1973, to the theatrical Bloody Tour. A guide in a cloak leads you down dark snickelways with stories of plague, executions and the Roman legion that a plumber said he saw marching through the cellar of the Treasurer's House in 1953. Enjoy it as theater, not history.

The Golden Fleece on Pavement, said to be York's most haunted pub, is a good place to finish.

In 1976, archaeologists digging under Coppergate before a shopping center was built found the waterlogged remains of a Viking town, so well preserved that wood, leather, fabric, even fleas, had survived a thousand years. Jorvik Viking Centre was built on the site, and you ride through a re-creation of the street as it was in 960, with its houses, workshops and the smells to go with them, then see the finds themselves.

The Vikings, the Great Heathen Army, captured York in 866, and for almost a century it was the capital of a Norse kingdom, until its last king, Eric Bloodaxe, was driven out in 954. It's a little theme park, and some find it cheesy, but it's well done, and the science behind it is real.

Around the corner on Fossgate, the Merchant Adventurers' Hall, built in 1357-61, is one of the finest medieval guildhalls in Europe, still owned by the same guild of merchants that built it. The great hall upstairs, with its huge timber roof, was where they did business; below is the hospital where they cared for the poor and the sick, and there's a small chapel. It's quieter and more real than most of what you'll see in York, and the timber floors creak like a ship.

William the Conqueror built a wooden castle on this mound in 1068 to hold down the rebellious north. In March 1190, the city's Jewish community, around 150 people, took refuge in it from a mob stirred up by men who owed them money. Besieged, many took their own lives rather than be killed or forcibly baptized, and those who came out were murdered. It's the worst massacre of Jews in medieval England. The tower takes its name, most likely, from Roger de Clifford, a rebel lord hanged from its walls in 1322.

The stone tower that stands here now was built by Henry III in the 13th century. English Heritage has put a roof deck on top, with views over the city, and tells the story of 1190 properly inside. In spring, daffodils on the mound are a memorial to the dead.

Across the square, in the old prisons of the castle, the York Castle Museum is a museum of everyday life, and the best of it is Kirkgate, a full-sized Victorian street with real shopfronts collected from all over Yorkshire: a sweet shop, a chemist, a pawnbroker and a police station. Downstairs are the cells of the debtors' prison, where the highwayman Dick Turpin spent his last night before he was hanged in York in 1739. His famous overnight ride from London to York on Black Bess never happened: the story was first told of another highwayman, John "Swift Nick" Nevison, in 1676, and a novelist, Harrison Ainsworth, moved it onto Turpin in 1834. Turpin's grave is three minutes away, in St George's churchyard.

Fossgate and Walmgate, just across the little River Foss, are where York's locals eat and drink, a street of independent restaurants and bars that's a world away from the tourist pubs of Stonegate. Have dinner on Fossgate, then walk on to Brew York's taproom on Walmgate, in an old warehouse by the river, for local craft beer. The Blue Bell on Fossgate, a tiny Edwardian pub with wood-paneled rooms, is one of the city's best, and has hardly changed since 1903. It doesn't let in groups.

On the East Cliff, the ruins of Whitby Abbey stand where Abbess Hilda founded a monastery in 657. In 664, the Synod of Whitby met here and decided that the English church would follow Rome, not the Irish monks, in setting the date of Easter, a turning point for English Christianity. The Gothic ruin you see is from the 13th century, a landmark for sailors ever since. Bram Stoker stayed in Whitby in 1890 and put the abbey into Dracula, whose ship runs aground here.

Climb up by the 199 Steps from the old town, past St Mary's Church and its graveyard of sailors' headstones leaning in the wind. The view of the harbor and the town from the top is the best in Whitby.

James Cook came to Whitby in 1746 as an apprentice to a Quaker shipowner, John Walker, and lodged in the attic of his house on Grape Lane. Here he learned to sail the Whitby colliers, sturdy coal ships, and when he set off to explore the Pacific, his Endeavour was a Whitby-built collier too. The house is now the Captain Cook Memorial Museum, with maps, letters and drawings from his voyages, in rooms that look much as they did.

Whitby is fish and chips country, and haddock is the fish here, not cod. The Magpie Café on Pier Road, in an old merchant's house by the harbor, is the most famous, and the queue is part of the experience. Or buy a portion from any of the chippies on the harbor and eat it on the pier, keeping a close eye on the gulls.

Walk the old town's cobbled Church Street, where jet jewelry, made from the fossilized wood found on the beaches here, was all the rage after Queen Victoria wore it in mourning. Fortune's on Henrietta Street has been smoking kippers, herring over oak, since 1872.

Cross the swing bridge to the West Cliff and climb to the Whalebone Arch, a whale's jawbone that recalls Whitby's whaling days, and the statue of Cook looking out to sea. From here you look across the harbor at the abbey on the other side. If the tide's out, walk down to the beach, and on the way back, stop for an ice cream before the bus home across the moors.

The Yorkshire Museum tells the story of Roman, Viking and medieval York with some of the best finds in Britain: the Melsonby Hoard, the largest hoard of Iron Age metalwork ever found in Britain, with the remains of chariots and horse harness; the Vale of York Hoard, a Viking silver cup packed with coins and jewelry; and the Ivory Bangle Lady, a rich woman of the 4th century buried in York who, scientists found, probably had North African ancestry. Roman York was a big, mixed city, and she's the proof.

Around it, the Museum Gardens are York's favorite park, with the ruins of St Mary's Abbey, once one of the richest in England until Henry VIII closed it in 1539, and the Multangular Tower, a corner of the Roman fortress wall.

Sunday lunch in England is a roast, and in Yorkshire it comes with a proper Yorkshire pudding, the crisp, puffed-up batter cup that was once served first, with gravy, to fill you up before the meat. Roast beef, potatoes, vegetables, gravy, and a pint: it's the most Yorkshire meal there is. Locals like the Ackhorne, an old pub tucked behind Micklegate, which serves food only at Sunday lunch, and the Star Inn the City, with a terrace by the river in the Museum Gardens.

York became a railway town in the 1840s, when George Hudson, the "Railway King", made it the hub of the lines in the north of England. Behind the station, the National Railway Museum is one of the biggest railway museums in the world, in old engine sheds. The star is Mallard, the blue streamlined steam engine that set the world speed record for steam, 126 mph (203 km/h), in 1938, a record it still holds. There's a Japanese bullet train, Queen Victoria's royal carriage, upholstered like a drawing room, and a whole hall of famous engines.

Stonegate follows the line of a Roman road straight towards the Minster, and a sign for Ye Olde Starre Inne has hung across the whole street since 1733. The pub, first recorded in 1644, is said to have been used as a hospital and mortuary by Parliamentarian soldiers after the siege of York that year. Look up at the little red devil on the corner of Coffee Yard, the sign of an old printer's shop.

York claims a pub for every day of the year, and in the old center that's close to true. After the Starre, try the Blue Bell if you missed it (it gives out free cheese on Sunday evenings), and the House of the Trembling Madness, a beer shop downstairs and a medieval hall full of stuffed animals upstairs. For Yorkshire's own beer, look for Sam Smith's, from Tadcaster, ten miles away: its pubs, like the Kings Arms on the river, pour the cheapest pint in town, and its owner has in recent years banned phones and swearing in them.

In the 1980s, builders about to redevelop an office block off Stonegate found a medieval house hidden inside it. It turned out to be Barley Hall, built around 1360 for the monks of Nostell Priory and later home to a Lord Mayor of York. It's been restored to look as it did around 1483, with a great hall open to the roof, painted cloths and furniture you're allowed to sit on, and it's a quick, good way to see how a wealthy family lived in medieval York.

York was England's chocolate city. Two Quaker families, the Rowntrees and the Terrys, built huge factories here: the Rowntrees invented the Fruit Pastille, Aero and the KitKat, first sold in 1935, and the Terrys the Chocolate Orange in 1932. The Rowntrees also built model housing for their workers and gave the city parks. York's Chocolate Story, on King's Square at the end of the Shambles, is a guided tour of all of it, with tastings and a chance to make your own.

Nestlé still makes KitKats in York, and on a warm day the whole north of the city smells of chocolate. The Terry's factory closed in 2005, but its clock tower still stands over the racecourse.

After the medieval houses and the Victorian street, Fairfax House, on Castlegate, is Georgian York: a townhouse built in the 1760s for Viscount Fairfax and his only daughter, Anne, with plasterwork ceilings and a staircase that make it one of the finest of its time in England. It was rescued from use as a cinema and a dance hall and filled with the furniture collection of Noel Terry, of the chocolate family.

From King's Staith, a few minutes from Fairfax House, sightseeing boats run an hour-long trip on the Ouse, past the old warehouses and the bridges, the Museum Gardens and the abbey ruins, with a commentary on the river's history of trade, Vikings and floods. From spring to September there are evening cruises too.

Back on dry land, follow the river path south along the Ouse, past the Millennium Bridge, to Rowntree Park, given to the city by the chocolate family in memory of their workers who died in World War I. A few streets away is Bishopthorpe Road, which locals call Bishy Road: a street of independent cafés, bakeries and delis that was named Britain's best high street in 2015, and a good place for a late lunch. Racegoers come the same way to the Knavesmire, the racecourse just beyond, from May to October.

Walk back towards town through Bishophill, the quiet streets inside the walls south of the river, to the Golden Ball on Cromwell Road, a corner pub with an Edwardian interior so well kept it's on CAMRA's list of historic pub interiors, owned and run by its regulars as a co-operative since 2012. It's where locals send you when you ask for a real York pub. Order a Yorkshire ale and drink to York.