Durham – a Beautiful Old City Day Out

The day of my UFO Concert in Newcastle, we had a few hours to fill. I’d never been to Durham but it was only 15 minutes from Newcastle by train so Richard and I decided to go there. He’d been before so could act as my guide 🙂

All photos Richard’s digi camera as I didn’t take mine

As it was a lovely sunny day, the first thing we decided to do was walk the loop around the river bank. This takes you around the old part of the city and is a beautiful walk. It was also out of the cold wind so was lovely and warm for March.

The spring flowers were in beautiful bloom here. This particular building had a little history post outside it – apparently it is called “the Count’s House” and the count was essentially a dwarf who was an entertainer. The most interesting point about it was that, apparently, at one time, it housed a family of seven! But I think they only really used it for a summer house…

You can read about the house and the count on this link here and here anyway…

hmmm – bit of a squash for seven!

Just after the “Count’s House” we turned the large bend in the river to head back to town – here is the view from the bridge…

There is a strange carved stone bench where the back of it is all gargoyle heads – a bit hard to see them though as this had to be taken into the sun…

and a beautiful willow tree…

There is a lovely walkway through woodland which takes you back up to the streets and gives excellent views across to the cathedral (apart from the trees of course) – this starts off by an interesting pillar…

We then headed off to the magnificent cathedral for a look around – this is truly beautiful inside and out… the first photo is taken across the quadrangle between the cloisters surrounding it on four sides…

The interior of the church was really beautiful and we enjoyed looking around it. I’m not so keen on taking photos inside a church though as it seems a little disrespectful somehow so we limited ourselves to two…

This first one, I was totally entranced by the rainbow of light coming through the stained glass windows and onto these pillars…

I thought they came out quite well in the photo. I also had Richard take a photo of the very detailed and ornate huge gold lecturn – unfortunately, the sheer amount of detail hasn’t really been portrayed by the photo but, perhaps, some of the majesty of it has…

As we exited the cathedral, we found a lovely sunny green outside a cafe with lovely carved wooden benches – we didn’t buy any food but I had a little sunbathe and a look down at the river…

Onto the castle… Unfortunately, the university have taken over many of the beautiful old buildings so we contented ourselves with taking photos of their exteriors…

We had a mosey to the castle gate for the bit where the public can look around but felt we were too broke for the admission fee unfortunately – maybe next time…

There is a lovely square by the castle where we managed to sit in the sun out of the wind for quite a while. Lovely views around the square and interesting things… like this old Victorian post box…

Victorian Pillar Box

There was a cafe in the square but, being fully in the tourist part of Durham and near to the castle and cathedral, we felt it would be out of our price range (I really am feeling broke just now). So we set off down the old, winding, cobbled streets and found something far more suited to our pocket – the Salvation Army cafe. In this we got a tea/coffee each for a pound and I got a lovely slice of home-made cake for another pound. Can’t go wrong really – great grub and we were helping out those less fortunate (and more broke than us!) – winner 🙂

After this, I had to set off back on the train to get dolled up for my concert – as you can see from my previous post, this worked to good effect 😉

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