Durham

The cathedral and castle rise from a wooded peninsula in the River Wear, their reflection doubling the silhouette into something that looks fortified even in water. Durham is a compact city set on the most dramatic natural site in urban England — a hilltop loop of river that made it impregnable and unforgettable.

Durham Cathedral, begun in 1093, is the finest Norman building in England and the first in Europe to carry pointed ribbed vaults — a structural leap that prefigured the whole Gothic age. It shelters the shrine of St Cuthbert, carried here by monks who fled Lindisfarne's Viking raids with his coffin in 875 and wandered a century before the river loop told them to stop, and its Romanesque pillars are cut with zigzags deep enough to cast candlelit shadows; the Galilee Chapel keeps some of the finest twelfth-century wall painting left in Britain. The castle opposite housed the Prince-Bishops — palatinate rulers with their own armies — and has been a university college since 1832. The riverbank walk loops the whole peninsula beneath overhanging trees, the cathedral appearing and disappearing through the canopy, with Prebends Bridge serving the county's most photographed view.