York

The Great East Window holds medieval glass the size of a tennis court, taken out pane by pane and reset. Below the floor the Roman fortress foundations lie exposed beside the piers carrying the tower. The tower stair runs 275 steps with no turning back.

The walkway on top rings most of the centre, and the full circuit is a two-hour walk. Some stretches carry a rail on one side only, so children walk on the inside. Access closes at dusk, which puts the walls out of reach in the evening.

For a photograph, come at dawn. The upper floors lean out until the eaves nearly touch across the lane, and iron hooks that once hung meat still sit above a few doorways. The shelf under each door was the counter.

Built over the dig itself, it rebuilds a Viking street down to the smells. You go through in a small car on a track, so stopping to look is not an option. The 2015 flood put it under water, and it took sixteen months to reopen.

Admission to the railway museum costs nothing, and its steam locomotives stand where you can walk right up to them. A pit lets you go under a carriage and look up at the underframe, while the largest exhibits sit in a second hall over a footbridge.

In 1190 more than a hundred and fifty of York's Jews died on this spot. A plaque on the outer wall records it. Inside the quatrefoil stone shell a separate timber frame now carries hanging walkways and a roof deck. The steps up the mound outside are steep.

A timber hall the merchant guild raised in the 14th century, its upper room one open span with no columns. Below was a room for tending the sick, so the floors differ in purpose, and the river has filled it more than once, leaving marks on the wall.

One line of wall is all that was left standing after the abbey came down, and the museum gardens around it charge nothing and open early.

A great house under a dome, twenty-five kilometres north-east of York. Fire took the roof and the dome in 1940; the dome was rebuilt in the 1960s, with fresh painting inside. The grounds take more time to circle than the house does.

The meadow the racecourse sits on once held the city's gallows. On days without racing the turf is open and people walk dogs across it, while the four-day August meeting lifts room prices in town and fills the trains.

A museum of everyday life in the old debtors' prison. Kirkgate, a Victorian street set up in 1938, is rebuilt down to the goods inside its shops. The cell said to have held the highwayman Dick Turpin, hanged in 1739, is shown too.

A neoclassical building in the Museum Gardens covering Roman York and Viking finds. The Middleham Jewel, a 15th century gold pendant, is the star piece. The garden door leads straight out to the abbey ruins.

A medieval church hidden in a yard behind a narrow arch off Goodramgate. 17th and 18th century box pews survive on an uneven floor. There is no electric light, so on dull days the interior is dim.

Ruins of a Cistercian abbey founded in 1132, inscribed with the Studley Royal water garden beside it in 1986. It lies near Ripon, a 40-minute drive out of York. The long vaulted cellarium is the most intact part of the ruin.

Rowntree's and Terry's were both York firms, and the Kit Kat first appeared in York in 1935. A guide tells the company stories and you make a bar of your own. It sits near the Shambles, easy to fit into a walk round town.