Historic Chester itinerary | Two days on foot from the walls

The Roman Gardens laid out below Chester's sandstone city walls — The walls above the Roman Gardens.

Onto the walls first

The Romans built the first wall here, the Saxons and Normans rebuilt and stretched it, and Georgian Chester turned the top into a walk around the city.

The Roman Garden steps are one of the gentlest ways up onto Chester's walls, which run for about two miles, and from the top the rooftops of the old city open out below the parapet.

You don't need the full circuit on day one. The short southern stretch towards Bridgegate gives views over the Old Dee Bridge and the weir, and on the way the walk drops down six little flights of three steps, the Wishing Steps. A local legend says that if you run up, down and up again without taking a breath, your wish comes true. A section of the walls is sometimes closed for repairs, and our walking map shows each route on foot.

The Old Dee Bridge from the walls
Steps on the city walls walk

Chester's Roman amphitheatre seen from above, with blossom on the trees — The Roman amphitheatre.

Roman Chester before lunch

Before a fight, the performers in this arena could stop at a little shrine to Nemesis, the goddess believed to decide their fate.

Chester's Roman amphitheatre is the largest in Britain, and it stood just outside the fortress of Deva. Only about two fifths of it can be seen, so the rest lies under the streets around you, and from the edge you can picture the crowds.

The Roman Gardens gather stone columns and a hypocaust, the floor heating from a Roman bathhouse, in one quiet strip below the walls. The red sandstone ruins of St John's stand beside the amphitheatre, with lunch at one of the cafés in Chester close by.

Roman floor heating
St John's ruins in the evening sun

Bridge Street and its black and white Rows on a quiet sunny morning — Bridge Street Row.

The Rows, medieval galleries above the street

On Watergate Row, Bishop Lloyd's House is named after George Lloyd, Bishop of Chester four hundred years ago, and its front still carries carved panels of Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel, and Abraham and Isaac.

The Rows are covered galleries at first floor level that turn Chester's main streets into two storey shopping streets, believed to be the only ones of their kind and over 700 years in the making. They run out from the Cross along Bridge Street, Eastgate Street and Watergate Street.

One stretch at street level, then the steps and the gallery above on the way back, shows them best. The undercrofts are the medieval stone cellars below the shops, and many of the black and white fronts were rebuilt by the Victorians. Bridge Street and Watergate Street are plenty for one afternoon, and Lower Bridge Street's timber framed houses are on your way home.

Under the beams on a Rows gallery
Lower Bridge Street, on the way home

The sandstone west front of Chester Cathedral under a blue sky — The west front of Chester Cathedral.

Day two: Chester Cathedral

In one corner of Chester Cathedral, a church courtroom still has its old wooden furnishings, the best surviving example of its kind in the country.

Stay at Enjoy the Pause, a holiday home inside the city walls, and Chester Cathedral is an 8 minute walk from your front door, so day two starts with the bells, not the traffic.

Its red sandstone holds almost a thousand years of change. Monks founded a Benedictine abbey here in 1092, and it became the Cathedral in 1541, so the cloisters deserve time as well as the nave.

Chester Cathedral is still a place of worship, so services can close parts of the building, and tours run on set days. Most of the route is step free, and a ramp can be put out in some places.

Carved sandstone up close
The Cathedral from Town Hall Square
The vaulted ceiling and a stained glass window

The red brick front of the Grosvenor Museum on Grosvenor Street, with its arched doorway — The Grosvenor Museum on Grosvenor Street.

A museum afternoon, whatever the weather

Caecilius Avitus came from Mérida in Spain, served fifteen years with the Twentieth Legion and died in Chester at 34. His tombstone in the Grosvenor Museum still shows him in his heavy soldier's cloak.

The Grosvenor Museum gathers Roman finds, Chester's own story and a gallery of paintings under one roof.

A little further along Grosvenor Street, the architect Thomas Harrison raised a new Chester Castle two hundred years ago, with columns like a Greek temple, on the ruins of the Norman one. One of his buildings is now the Cheshire Military Museum, the story of Cheshire's soldiers from the 1600s to today, with the pen used to sign the Japanese surrender at the end of the Second World War among its cases. It opens from Thursday to Sunday, so it fits a break that runs to the end of the week.

Storyhouse on Northgate Street is a library, cinema and theatre in one, inside Chester's old 1930s Odeon. On a wet day, the museums and Storyhouse can fill most of your day, with the walls and the river saved for a drier one.

Chester Castle
Storyhouse on Northgate Street

The Groves riverside with boats and the Old Dee Bridge beyond — The Groves and the Old Dee Bridge.

Finish by the River Dee

More than nine hundred years ago, Hugh Lupus, the first Earl of Chester, had a weir built across the Dee to drive the abbey's mills, and the river still pours over it below the Old Dee Bridge.

It's a fitting place to end two days of Chester's history, and a last stretch of the walls leads back towards home.

Grosvenor Park has surfaced paths and flower beds for a gentler finish. For a third day there are more things to do in Chester, and when your dates are set, book the house direct.