York City Walls

About this place

The longest and best-kept town walls in England, and every step of them is free: roughly 3.4 kilometres of pale stone looping around York's old core on grassy earth banks, in places still sitting on the foundations of the Roman fortress laid down in AD 71. Most of what you see is thirteenth- and fourteenth-century work, but the date is not the point. The point is that you walk above the city rather than through it, looking down into back gardens and across tiled roofs to the Minster from an angle that street-level York never offers. Four great gatehouses break the circuit, and York calls them 'bars', not gates. Micklegate Bar to the south-west was the royal ceremonial entrance, and the spikes on its roof once carried the heads of traitors; Bootham Bar to the north-west keeps eleventh-century stonework and gives the finest view of York Minster; Monk Bar is the tallest and still has a working portcullis; Walmgate Bar is the only town gate in England with its outer barbican intact. One correction to older guidebooks: the small City Walls Experience inside Micklegate Bar shut at the end of 2024 and the building is being turned into a private print studio and gallery, while the Richard III museum in Monk Bar has been closed since 2020 and since summer 2026 houses a history-themed gift shop instead. Do not plan on a museum visit inside any of them; the walls themselves are the attraction. The full loop takes about two hours with photo stops, but nobody is obliged to do it all. Short on time, walk only the stretch from Bootham Bar to Monk Bar behind the Minster; twenty minutes there gives you the best of the entire circuit. Gates open daily at 8am and lock at dusk: as late as 9pm in June and July, but only 3.30pm from late October through January, and the walls stay shut all day when the stones are icy or the wind is up. The circuit also has two gaps, at Layerthorpe and along the River Foss, where you drop to pavement level and climb back up further on. For families: the path is narrow, the parapet is low or absent in many places, and every bar is reached by a steep stone stair, so this is no place for a pushchair or wheelchair and small children should be kept by the hand. Arriving by train, you can climb onto the walls two minutes from York station, and the short stretch from there to Lendal Bridge gives the classic view of the Minster across the river.