We're taking you to York, one of the most historic cities in England.
We will be showing you the great old buildings, some street entertainment – presenting you
a summary in this episode of our series of movies that we're creating about York, and
this will be a five-minute package for you that is going to wrap it all up.
We visited York as part of our tour of the British Isles that includes many other places
we are presenting on our YouTube channel.
It's easy to get to York.
There is wonderful train service – they can bring you up from London in just two hours,
or in our case we're arriving from the city of Bath.
There is a convenient elevator in the York train station that will get you down to the
next platform and up again.
It's a grand old station, very historic and yet modern – conveniently located right
next to the old town.
It was very easy for our small group to walk from the station across the street, then through
a gate in the old wall to our hotel, The Grand.
I'll be your tour guide and cameraman for the visit to York.
So we start out with a brief orientation talk outside the hotel
We're going to cover more of the main highlights of the town.
The three top sights really are walking on the wall and doing the Castle Museum and the
Minister, the great cathedral.
You look at any list of things to do in York, and those are the top three.
So that's what we'll do this morning and we will stitch it together with a little bit
of walking.
The wall walk is very easy – you just walk up one flight of steps and then the wall is
level, and we will go on the most scenic part of the wall, between, after Monkbar – nice
views of the Minster.
Then we come down from the wall.
We will walk a few blocks through the old town to the Castle Museum.
It opens at 9:30 so it's good to get there early, and it's a fabulous collection.
It has so many artifacts in there.
It was collected by physician, a fellow named Dr. Kirk who was practicing between 1890 and
1920, and he was a country doctor here, and often in lieu of fee, he would just collect
things from people's houses.
And then he also purchased – he was a great collector and donated everything to the city.
The Castle Museum is located inside a former women's prison, and it's next to Clifford's
Tower, which we can see from the outside is a great monument from the early days of William
the Conqueror and medieval times.
And then after the Castle Museum we can walk back up through town to the Minster and go
in.
These are paid attractions, they are each about 10 pounds to get into each one of them,
but certainly well worth it.
And that will take us right through early lunch.
Afternoon suggestion will be the National Railway Museum.
Of course it's next to the train station and it's free and it has the best collection of
trains in the world.
That would be something very easy to walk over to, it would take you less than five
minutes to get to the railway museum from here, it's right next to the train station.
And then there's a few other museums this afternoon you might consider, especially the
Yorkshire Museum.
It's in the Museum Garden.
They have a fine collection of Roman artifacts, and some other stuff from 17th, 18th century,
but especially sculpture and tools, artifacts, jewelry from the Roman days.
Remember the Romans.
Quick recap.
They got here about the year 70 and established a town.
York became their northern capital.
The Roman military encampment is where the Minster is today.
Of course the Romans had built a wall around the city – we saw little bit of of that
Roman wall.
And then the Romans left and history went on.
You heard a lot of it from John yesterday.
Now, John did a fabulous job.
We did the walking tour with a local guide instead of the bus tour, because the bus tour
frankly, not so interesting.
And here's what we saw with with John.
I circled in black for you.
He really focused on the central area of town.
We had a great time with him, from what we saw.
This morning I'll show you little bit more that rest of the town, and then you have the
afternoon.
It's so easy, it's only 500 yards from one end of town to the other, it's very compact.
And we're very well-connected here at the Grand Hotel to come back if you want to freshen
up, bounce back out again.
A walk at 8 PM in the streets is really quite nice.
I did it myself from 8:00 to 8:30 last night, and I was taking pictures, and there were
some people out walking around, restaurants are open, shops were all closed.
Nice lighting, very peaceful.
It gets busy during the day, this town's very popular of course, we know that, we saw some
of that yesterday.
Tomorrow morning we’re leaving at 9 AM, so we will assemble in the lobby with our
bags.
And we will have our private shuttle van will take us across the Yorkshire Dales over to
the Lake District for the next phase of our journey.
We will be presenting many more movies about the British Isles in our series on our YouTube
channel.
Why don’t you take a moment to subscribe to our YouTube channel so you can be informed
about our regular uploads, and take a look at our website for listings of our 1200 travel
movies.