Walled Towns & Hilltowns

The Italian hilltown is one of the great inventions of the medieval world — a community built for defence, for community, and for the view. San Gimignano in Tuscany is the most famous, its fourteen surviving towers rising above the Val d'Elsa like a medieval Manhattan; arrive before nine in the morning and the streets are yours. Montepulciano sits on a long ridge above the Valdichiana, its main street climbing through Renaissance palaces to a cathedral square with a view that stops conversation. But the most extraordinary of all may be Civita di Bagnoregio — a town built on a plateau of crumbling tufa rock in northern Lazio, connected to the modern world by a single pedestrian footbridge, its population now fewer than a dozen permanent residents. To walk into Civita is to walk into a place that is genuinely disappearing; the rock beneath it erodes a little more each year, and the town has been called the dying city for centuries. It is one of the most affecting places in Italy.

In France, Provins sits quietly in the Ile-de-France, an hour from Paris and almost entirely unknown to non-French visitors. It was one of the great Champagne Fair towns of the twelfth century — a place where merchants from across Europe converged to trade cloth, spices and money — and its UNESCO-listed ramparts, tithe barn and underground passages survive almost intact. In Spain, Avila is the most complete example of medieval military architecture on the Iberian peninsula: two and a half kilometres of walls, eighty-eight towers, nine gates, all built in the eleventh century and still encircling a living city. Further east, Cuenca is something else entirely — a UNESCO World Heritage town perched on a narrow ridge above two river gorges, its famous Casas Colgadas, the hanging houses, suspended over the cliff edge as if daring gravity to intervene.

Ireland's walled towns are among the least visited and most rewarding in Europe. Derry — or Londonderry, depending on which tradition you come from — is the only completely intact walled city in Ireland and one of the last walled cities built in Europe, its circuit of seventeenth-century walls still walkable in their entirety above a city that wears its complicated history with remarkable openness. Kilkenny is the finest medieval city in the south: a Norman castle, a magnificent cathedral, a streetplan that has barely shifted since the thirteenth century, and a high street that still follows the line of the original medieval road. Athenry in County Galway is smaller and quieter — most visitors drive straight past it — but it preserves some of the most complete town walls in Ireland, a Norman castle, and a Dominican priory, all within a few minutes' walk of each other. In Scotland, Edinburgh's Old Town is a medieval city in everything but name: the Royal Mile descends from castle to palace along a ridge that has been continuously inhabited for a thousand years, its closes and wynds unchanged in plan since the fifteenth century. St Andrews, further north on the Fife coast, adds the ruins of what was once the largest cathedral in Scotland, a castle perched above the sea, and a town that has the unhurried quality of a place that knows exactly what it is.

These are not museum towns. People live in them, shop in them, argue in them. The walls are real walls; the streets are real streets. What makes them worth the detour — and sometimes worth building an entire journey around — is the particular feeling of walking a street that has not fundamentally changed in five or six centuries. It is not nostalgia. It is something closer to perspective.