Chester, England
 

Hello,

We will be in Chester in August and I was wondering if anyone has any ideas for tours or what not to miss while we are there.

Chester has a nice cathedral to visit, and a large collection of timbered buildings are quitre picturesque - I easily spent several hours wandering around the town, just checking out shops and enjoying the atmosphere.
Also, if you're that close, you might want to head over to Conway in Wales -a great walled town and castle that's well worth seeing!!

Hi
Not to be missed in Chester is the walk around the city walls. There are two small towers on the walls which, when I went some years ago, had interesting exhibitions.
The black and white shopping precinct known as "The Rows" is Chester's unique centre and fun to explore.
Chester also has an excavated Roman amphitheatre and various Roman remains.
We rested our feet with a boat trip on the river. Enjoy

Rosemary

My great great grandfather (or maybe there was another great in there :?) did some of the wood carving on the rood screen in Chester cathedral!
It is a lovely cathedral, and as has been mentioned the walls are good too. Chester is (or was - I haven't been for many years) a lovely little city to visit.

Well, there's something for the 'small world' thread currently running. My great....(I think there are 6) gfather (and only Welsh ancestor) served his time as an apprentice stone mason in Chester (his indentures are still in Chester Record Office). Obviously the quality end of the Chester building trade used to be a popular career choice.

Apart from the city itself, there are frequent trains and buses into Liverpool, about which not enough good can be said. There's a great deal more to North Wales than Conway, and a lot of it's accessible by train from Chester: avoid its rather tacky coast strip for tons of castles (of which, though you have to drive to it, Beaumaris is the most beautiful, but nearer places like Rhuddlan are just great fun, especially for children or dogs to play round). And the walking round Snowdonia is great, though even in August you must keep an eye on weather forecasts, always assume it'll actually be a great deal worse than forecast (the area's impossible to forecast weather in accurately) and follow safety advice to the letter.

To the south, Shropshire's the most unspoilt bit of England (practically the lowest light and noise pollution of any county) and Ludlow's extraordinary for being an English provincial town where's it's possible to eat seriously good food. Explore the area round Ironbridge for stunning industrial archaeology.

You need to organise all this yourselves. Apart from the Beatle industry in Liverpool (and there's far, far more to the centre of consciousness of the universe - not my words, but those ofthe American beat poet Alan Ginsburg - than the minutiae of one average pop group's adolescence) such organised tours as you'll find locally are geared to the "let's look at a few pretty Welsh waterfalls and spend most of the day gossiping in the kind of cafe that went out of fashion everywhere else 40 years ago" market.

Small world indeed Flanner, my great whatever he was grandfather was also Welsh and his name is in the records held by the cathedral!

Isn't it still legal to shoot a Welsh person with a bow and arrow if found within the city walls of Chester after midnight... ;)

Maybe: but for all their affected genteelness, Cestrians are just Scousers in exile.

And how many Scousers can shoot straight after chucking out time?

Isn't the place meant to be full of rich footballers and their WAG's these days?

Why is a person from Chester a Cestrian and not a Cunian?

My advice for Chester is like the others: walk around. Walk the wall, and walk the old galleries of the Chester Rows lining the main streets. Try to avoid the outside of the old city; even the walk down from the train station is pretty dull going.

I quite enjoyed the Roman Amphitheatre on Little St. John Street, though I understand it's undergoing excavation again. They're digging up all kinds of exciting artifacts, as you can see here:

http://capweb.blogspot.com/

and

http://www.chester.gov.uk/amphitheatre/finds.htm

If you're going to be going to the north Wales coast, you could do a lot worse than take the train to the old slate-mining town of Blaenau Ffestiniog, where they used to be able to split the slate thin enough to read a newspaper through. At Blaenau on the same platform you can switch to the most adorable heritage railway in the world, which will haul you over narrow gauge rails (by either a steam or diesel locomotive) down to the harbor of Porthmadog and back, through some really gorgeous scenery.