In York: walking the walls

July 3, 2024

On our layover day in York Rachael combined a walk around the city’s walls with an out and back on the Foss Way, one of the walking routes that radiates out from the city along its waterways. This one is along the River Foss, a minor tributary of the Ouse that flows in from the north end merges into the Ouse just behind our pub.

First though, the walls. From Wikipedia: York has, since Roman times, been defended by walls of one form or another. To this day, substantial portions of the walls remain, and York has more miles of intact wall than any other city in England. They are known variously as York City Walls, the Bar Walls and the Roman walls (though this last is a misnomer as very little of the extant stonework is of Roman origin, and the course of the wall has been substantially altered since Roman times). The walls are generally 13 feet (4m) high and 6 feet (1.8m) wide. They are the longest town walls in England.

The linked article has much more to say about the walls than this brief overview, including their complicated history that parallels the history of the city itself. The original walls were built by the Romans in 71 AD under the rule of Septimius Severus. two centuries later they were enhanced under the rule of Constantine the Great by adding the Multiangular tower, which still exists. The walls were in poor shape when the Danes occupied the city in 867 and then reinforced them and demolished all of the original towers, sparing only the Multiangular Tower. Most of the walls that survive today though date from the 13th and 14th centuries.

Impressive, if not up to the high bar set by those astonishing walls we saw this spring in Avila. Still though, pretty great. I was sorry I hadn’t realized that you could walk them or I would probably done that myself instead of taking the bike ride I did. It’s one of a number of reasons for us to consider coming back to York some year.