Travel Donal O’Donoghue heads to Chester, en famille
Even under grey skies, the historic city of Chester has enough attractions, not least a world- famous zoo, to satisfy all ages and appetites. Donal O’Donoghue visits with his family
It was only on my last day in Chester that I truly got to see it. That Sunday evening, with time on my hands, I did what most tourists to this old Roman city do: I climbed up on the city walls and set out on the two-mile hike around the only completely walled city in England. The air was January chill, a whispery mist on the river Dee, with few people about, just the odd knot of visitors snapping photographs in the fading light. Time and place had shivered into one, and there was a feeling of otherness. Ahead of me lay I knew not, as for once I had done little research and knew no more than the bare bones about this ancient city except that my wife wanted to see its famous zoo.
Two days earlier we (my wife and our wee man) arrived in the walled city, about 90 minutes drive from the ferry at Holyhead. Chester is just beyond the Welsh border, an important settlement that has long felt the tug of history. Settled, built and raided by Romans, Vikings and Normans, Chester’s story is told in its architecture, like the ornate Victorian Eastgate Clock and the castle built on the orders of William the Conqueror. These days the invaders are less war-like, with thousands flocking to Chester for the races and countless others for attractions like the zoo, the cathedral, the castle and the charms of a city that wears its long and colourful history proudly.
On Saturday morning, the city centre buzzes: the crowds are in town for the weekly market, everything from hearty pies to vinyl classics. We wandered along the quaint streets (some of the distinctive black-and-white Tudor-style buildings are Victorian creations) with trendy cafés and designer label stores. Unique among them are the Rows, with shops and dwellings on different levels, accessed by stone steps and street after street of ancient alehouses. In Chester Cathedral, a young girl pays a pound to add another brick to the epic replica model of the cathedral (350,000 bricks and counting in this ingenious fundraising project), while tourists come and go through the vast 1,000-year-old building which echoes to choral evensong every day except Wednesday and has free guided tours daily.
By 10.30 on Sunday morning, Chester Zoo car park is already echoing with the cries of excited children tumbling out of cars. It’s not just the young ones, though, their parents are excited too about visiting the most famous zoo in Britain (the popular Channel 4 series, The Secret Life of the Zoo is now in its 12th season). It’s a vast place, a 15-minute drive from the centre of Chester in the rolling Cheshire countryside, where the first animal we see (there are over 21,000 here) is a baby elephant tugging at a bale of hay. You can walk among the butterflies and through a bat cave where they flitter past your face or hang upside-down. There are pink flamingos, Technicolor parrots, black (and smelly) rhinos, giant otters, dwarf mongooses and show-off sun bears. If you don’t fancy the walk, you can take the monorail that shuttles overhead linking the main attractions.
On the morning we leave Chester, the sun is shining, the first rays of sunshine all weekend. It mattered little. The evening before, my walk on the wall took me past the Roman gardens, above the medieval streets and the great bulk of the castle. By the darkened racecourse, I imagined it on festival day, bustling with colour and celebration, and along the silent Dee, I saw it reborn in summer time with a flotilla of boats and revellers. Two miles of walking ended with a pint of ale in the Bear and Billet. “Still cold outside?” asked the man at the pumps before I cadged a table by a roaring open fire. I know that years from now, when memories have faded and bones are rusting, whenever I think of Chester it will be of that walk along its walls. That is unless we go back. I strongly suspect we will.