York in 2 days, on foot

This 2-day self-guided walking plan for York covers 18 narrated sights in an easy day-by-day order. Each day is split into a morning and an afternoon loop, and every stop has a two to three minute audio story in the Gingerguide app.

You set the pace: this is a suggested order, not a schedule. Walk it in 2 days, or stretch it out. Reorder freely; York rewards a detour.

Day 1

Morning

1. National Railway Museum: One of the world's great railway museums, free to enter beside York's station, home to Mallard, holder of the steam speed record, and the only Japanese bullet train in Britain.
2. Museum Gardens & St Mary's Abbey: Ten green acres by the river holding two thousand years of York: the soaring ruins of a great Benedictine abbey, a genuine Roman corner tower, and a lovely Victorian botanic garden around them.
3. Yorkshire Museum: One of England's oldest museums, a small treasure house of York's 2,000 years, home to the golden Middleham Jewel and the Anglo-Saxon York Helmet that names its long-dead owner, Oshere.
4. York City Walls: More than two miles of medieval ramparts wrap York almost completely, the longest, most complete city walls in England, with a free walkway past four great gatehouses and endless views of the Minster.
5. York Minster: The largest medieval cathedral in England, 250 years in the building, holding the Great East Window, the biggest single sheet of medieval stained glass in Britain, painting the world from Genesis to Revelation.

Afternoon

1. Treasurer's House: The elegant house of the Minster's treasurers, kept exactly as its last owner left it, and famous for the 1953 tale of an apprentice who saw Roman soldiers march through its cellar.
2. Stonegate: York's handsomest old street, running up to the Minster along a buried Roman road, a thousand-year parade of shopfronts, printers' signs and the famous inn sign slung right across the street.
3. Barley Hall: A medieval townhouse rescued from near-ruin and rebuilt: a rich goldsmith's home of about 1483, brought back to life with rushes, fire and painted cloths, honest that much of it is reconstruction.
4. Bettys: A beloved Yorkshire tea room on a Georgian square, fitted out like a 1930s ocean liner, where wartime airmen scratched their names on a mirror that still hangs among the teacups.

Day 2

Morning

1. Holy Trinity, Goodramgate: A perfect, forgotten medieval church hidden off the street, never modernised, with a rolling, uneven floor, the only surviving box pews in York, and glass showing the rector who gave it in 1471.
2. Monk Bar: The tallest and most warlike of York's gates: a four-storey fortress with murder-holes over the arch and the city's only surviving portcullis, its top floor built in Richard III's reign.
3. The Shambles: York's most famous medieval street: a crooked lane of 600-year-old timber houses leaning so far over the cobbles that their upper floors almost touch overhead. Once the street of butchers.
4. Merchant Adventurers' Hall: A vast oak-framed medieval guildhall of the 1350s, the largest still used for its original purpose in Britain, with an almshouse-hospital below, owned by the same Company for over 660 years.
5. Jorvik Viking Centre: Ride a time capsule down into Viking-age York, rebuilt over the Coppergate dig where waterlogged clay preserved a whole 10th-century city, timber houses, leather shoes and all, almost intact.

Afternoon

1. Fairfax House: One of England's finest Georgian townhouses, built by a viscount for his daughter and fitted out by John Carr, rescued from life as a cinema and refilled with a superb collection of Georgian furniture.
2. Clifford's Tower: The stone keep on William the Conqueror's castle mound, and a solemn place of memory: here, in 1190, almost the whole Jewish community of York died besieged in an earlier wooden tower.
3. York Castle Museum: A museum of everyday life, grown from one country doctor's hoard, in York's old prison, home of Kirkgate, the first indoor reconstructed Victorian street in Britain.
4. Micklegate Bar: York's grandest gate, where monarchs still ask permission to enter the city, and where, for five centuries, the severed heads of traitors were spiked above the arch, the last removed in 1754.

Full York guide and all stops →