Roundabout ways

WALKING THE WALLS: For an alternative view of some of the UK’S most historic cities, Stephen Mcclarence takes a circular stroll.

F, in these cash-strapped times, you can’t afford to go round the world, you can always go round the walls instead. At least six UK towns and cities still have medieval walls where pedestrians can stride out, high above the day-to-day concerns of ground-level life below. And winter, when country walks risk mud and trudge, is a good time to explore them.

So off on the train to Uppermost England: to Berwick-upon-Tweed, whose walls gave me one of the best (though also one of the wettest) days out this year. But before our winter wall walk there, we need to stop off in at York, if only to smother ourselves in smugness about what we’ve got right here in Yorkshire.

York’s city walls add up to the UK’s longest circuit. On a good day, a complete round-trip can be as exhilarating as a cliff-top stroll, with a tide of rooftops stretching away and church towers piercing the sky like lighthouses. It draws a satisfying circle around the town.

The circuit, it’s true, includes a couple of dud patches. Foss Islands Road and Skeldergate Bridge, where the walls peter out for a few hundred yards, don’t set the soul soaring. But every visiting photographer has taken the classic view of the Minster from the approach to Lendal Bridge. And it would be hard to match the glorious stretch from Bootham to Monkgate, with its secluded “backstage” view of the Minster and more gardens than you’ve any right to expect in such a busy city.

Debate rages in wall-walking circles (and, after all, most wall walks are circular) about whether you should do York clockwise or anticlockwise. Personally I prefer anti-clockwise, starting at Micklegate Bar with coffee at the calm, civilised Bar Convent café.

Right, to Berwick, after a quick a word about Chester, whose walls are Britain’s oldest complete circuit. They offer more varied views than York’s (the racecourse, the cathedral, back street gardens, the river, the Shropshire Union Canal far

Debate rages about whether you should do York clockwise or anticlockwise.

below) and at two undemanding miles, they became a fashionable excuse for 18th-century promenading.

Daniel Defoe, visiting in the 1720s, reckoned they were “very firm, beautiful and in good repair” and offered “a very pleasant walk round the city”. It was a decent summary but Henry James, following in Defoe’s footsteps a century and a half later, was all lyrical luxuriance.

The walls, he wrote, were “now sloping, now bending, now broadening into a terrace, now narrowing into an alley, now swelling into an arch, now dipping into steps...” And then he spoiled it all by describing them as “the tortuous wallgirdle of the little swollen city”. Not a line the tourism people quote very much.

James was right, though. The idea of walls containing a city, squeezing it in like a girdle or a belt, is central to their appeal. And there’s great satisfaction in completing the whole circuit and, having beaten the bounds, ending up back where you started. It focuses you on a town, making you view it as a whole.

Right, with a quick footnote that the other walled (or half-walled) towns are Conway, Canterbury and Southampton... We’re on the train to Berwick. The walls first loom into view as you sweep over the