Morning: the walls and the Romans

09:30 — Walk in from the station

Chester station opened on 1 August 1848 and sits about fifteen minutes’ walk northeast of the centre, which is a better introduction than a taxi. Come in along City Road and Foregate Street and you arrive at the Eastgate from outside the walls, which is how the city was meant to be entered. If you have driven, use one of the three Park and Ride sites rather than hunting for a space inside the walls — getting here has the detail.

10:00 — Up onto the walls at the Eastgate

Start the circuit under the Eastgate Clock. It was designed by John Douglas, its movement built by J. B. Joyce and Company in 1897, and it opened on 27 May 1899 to mark Victoria’s diamond jubilee. Steps beside it take you up onto the walls.

Chester’s is the most complete circuit of city walls in Britain — 2.95km of walkway, a little under two miles, following the Roman line on two sides and the medieval extension on the others. It takes forty-five minutes to an hour at a walking pace, it is free, and it is the single best orientation you can get. Go clockwise: Eastgate, Northgate, past the canal cutting, round to the river.

Do not do the whole circuit now. Drop off at the Northgate, because the next two things are inside it.

10:45 — The cathedral

Chester Cathedral is not a cathedral that happens to have old bits; it is a complete Benedictine monastery that survived the dissolution because Henry VIII made it a cathedral in 1541 instead of pulling it down. That is why the cloisters, the chapter house and the refectory are all still there in sequence.

The thing to find is the choir stalls of about 1380, with forty-eight misericords carved on their undersides — lift the seats. Then the cloister garth, then out into the garden under the Addleshaw bell tower, which was built in the 1970s and is the only free-standing cathedral bell tower raised in England since the fifteenth century. Allow an hour; you can spend three.

Midday: the Rows and lunch

12:00 — Chester Cross and the Rows

Walk down Northgate Street to Chester Cross, where the four Roman streets still meet, and get up into the Rows. These are the thing Chester has that nowhere else does: a continuous second tier of shops at first-floor level, running above the street-level shops, with a covered walkway in front of them. They were in place by the fourteenth century and nobody has ever fully explained why they were built.

Watergate Street and Bridge Street have the best-preserved stretches. Look for the Three Old Arches on Bridge Street, the earliest identified stone shopfront in England, and go down into one of the medieval undercrofts if a shop has left its stairs open. There is a fuller account on the Rows.

13:00 — Lunch at the market, or a Row café

Chester Market moved into Exchange Square on 8 November 2022 — around sixty stalls under an oak roof, food from most of the world, open until ten from Tuesday to Saturday and closed Mondays. It is the easy answer, and it is two minutes from the Cross. If you would rather eat in a Row, there are cafés at both levels along Watergate Street. Where to eat and drink has the areas and the historic pubs.

Afternoon: the amphitheatre and the river

14:00 — The Roman amphitheatre

Ten minutes from the Cross, just outside the walls by the Newgate, is the largest Roman amphitheatre yet found anywhere in Britain: 95.7 by 87.2 metres, seating somewhere between eight and ten thousand. It went up in the late 70s AD and was enlarged around 200. Only the northern half has been excavated — the rest is under the buildings behind it, which is oddly more affecting than a full reconstruction would be. It is free and open, in the care of English Heritage.

14:45 — The Roman Gardens and the river

From the amphitheatre, walk down through the Roman Gardens — laid out in 1949 with columns and hypocaust pillars recovered from excavations across the city — and out onto the river at the Groves. This is the point in the day when Chester stops being a museum and starts being a town: a bandstand, rowing boats, ice cream, and the Queen’s Park suspension footbridge of 1923 with its 275-foot span.

Cross the Old Dee Bridge if you have the legs. It is largely of 1387, seven arches, widened by Thomas Harrison in the 1820s, and it takes you into Handbridge — where, in Edgar’s Field, the Minerva shrine of the early second century is still cut into the rock face. It is the only Roman shrine of its kind still in place in western Europe, and almost nobody goes to look at it.

15:45 — Finish the walls

Rejoin the walls at the Bridgegate and walk the river side back round: the Wishing Steps of 1785, then the racecourse below you on the Roodee. Racing has taken place there since 1539, which makes it the oldest racecourse still in operation anywhere; the flat green oval you are looking at is the silted-up Roman harbour. Come off at the Watergate or carry on to the Eastgate to close the loop.

Evening

If you have an hour before dinner, Storyhouse is the best use of it — a 1936 Art Deco cinema converted in 2017 into two theatres, a boutique cinema and a library that stays open late, all in the same building. You can sit in the library with a drink, which is a genuinely strange and pleasant thing to be able to do.

For dinner, the areas are covered on eat and drink. For a drink in something very old: the Bear and Billet on Lower Bridge Street, built in 1664 and Grade I listed; the Falcon, a house since around 1200 that enclosed its own stretch of the Rows in 1643; or Ye Olde King’s Head, with early thirteenth-century cellars under it.

If you have less than a day

Plan the rest of your trip

Two days is better than one, and it lets you get out: day trips covers eight, from Wrexham at twelve miles to Eryri at ninety minutes. What’s on has the annual calendar, where to stay covers the areas and when to book, and the history section runs to nineteen pages if you want to know why any of this is here.

Hero photograph: W. Bulach (CC BY-SA 4.0), via Wikimedia Commons