Durham City Guided Walking Tour with local expert guide｜United Kingdom

The walk runs about 1 hour and 45 minutes on foot, in a small group, moving roughly in order through the city's history.

We start at the Journey Statue, marking the moment in 995 when monks fleeing Viking raids finally buried the body of St Cuthbert on this bend in the River Wear, and Durham was born. From there we walk into the Marketplace, Durham's busiest square, built over a former churchyard that still holds a gruesome secret. We see three statues stand here, one genuinely loved and two with stranger stories of their own. We continue along Silver Street, the city's medieval high street, now lined with restaurants and bars.

At Framwellgate Bridge you get your first view of the Castle and Cathedral together. We see the Castle William the Conqueror built here in 1072, and hear how he fled the city in terror soon after, over a saint's coffin. From the riverside we take in the Cathedral itself, its stonework barely changed since 1180, and hear how Durham's Bishops ruled with the powers of kings for 750 years, right up until the last of them, Van Mildert, founded Durham University in the 1830s.

We walk on through the World Heritage Site around Palace Green, past the Cathedral's turns as Hogwarts and Asgard on screen, and the Chorister School, then out to Kingsgate Footbridge, which its engineer, Ove Arup, rated above his own work on the Sydney Opera House. From here we cover the coal industry that defined this county for five centuries, and the Durham Miners' Gala that still fills these streets every July. We finish at Elvet Bridge, with a ghost said to play his pipes at midnight, a nightclub with a reputation it may not deserve, and the story of a fog said to have hidden the Cathedral from German bombers in 1942.

We view Durham Cathedral and Durham Castle from the outside throughout. This tour doesn't go inside either building, and there's plenty of room for your own questions along the way.