Chester

Chester doesn't shout. It lures. Behind every half-timbered facade on The Rows – the medieval two-tiered galleries unique, in all the world, to these four streets – there are two thousand years of stories waiting to be overheard. Romans built a fortress here. Deva Victrix, they called it. The Eastgate that framed their march is still standing, topped since 1899 by a wrought-iron clock the English consider second only to Big Ben.

Visitors tick off the walls, cathedral and clock, then wonder why Chester feels like it's holding something back. It is. The city's real character runs considerably stranger: witch trials on Watergate Street, a headless Royalist wandering Tudor House after a Civil War cannonball, a hangman who dragged a drowned man from the River Dee to hang him anyway because he was paid by the noose.

VoiceMap's self-guided audio tours let Chester tell these stories at its own unhurried pace. A haunted circuit of the medieval centre, a WWI murder mystery, a children's time-travel from gladiators to knights – earbuds in, The Rows around you, cobbles doing the rest.