york

Calling all lovers of the historic and horrific: get your bucket lists out right now.

It was the day before my twentieth birthday, and I was in York, England, on a study abroad. I was standing with three other students and one of our professors, looking up at Clifford’s Tower, the keep of York’s medieval castle. It looked down at us, round, beige, and heavy from the top of a green hill. We were trying to decide where to go next. We had spent our morning walking on the walls of the city, and now we were looking for something else to see, something that we hoped wouldn’t come with a hefty price tag.

Sitting on layers of history dating back to the Neolithic groups that first settled the area, England’s city of York provides visitors with a myriad of activities and sites from modern to ancient. York was officially established by the Romans in 71 CE and has since been host to Angles, Normans, and royal lines of the Stuarts and Tudors. Today, the city’s center is still completely enclosed by the Bar Walls and offers Roman ruins, the largest Gothic cathedral in Northern England, quaint medieval streets, numerous museums, a racetrack, a theatre, a railway station, and an ample shopping district. York is located just a short drive from other exciting cultural sites, making it the perfect weeklong getaway.