Richmond

A Norman castle towers above a gorge where the River Swale has cut deep into limestone, and below it a Georgian theatre still stages plays in a space unchanged since 1788. Richmond is a market town that wears its centuries lightly, a town that has never tried to be anything else.

Richmond Castle, begun in 1071 by Alan Rufus of Brittany, ranks among the finest Norman fortifications in England, its Scolland's Hall among the oldest surviving domestic stone buildings in England — and the drop from the battlements to the Swale is sheer enough to hear the rapids. The cobbled marketplace, among England's largest, still trades on Saturdays under its original charter, ringed by coaching inns and independent shops that the chains never hollowed out. The Georgian Theatre Royal of 1788 is the most complete Georgian playhouse surviving in Britain — original boxes, pit seating and candle-effect lighting intact — and below the town the wooded gorge walks downstream to Easby Abbey in its meadow. Richmond guards the mouth of Swaledale, quietest of the Yorkshire Dales, with the Coast to Coast walk passing through.