Colchester

Siege Marks and Colchester Pubs

The timber frame of the Old Siege House is pocked with musket-ball holes from the 1648 siege. Someone has ringed and marked them around the doorway, so you can stand in the street and count the places the fighting reached. Inside it is now a bar and brasserie serving modern European food with English influences, in a half-timbered building that has been standing since the seventeenth century.

Colchester gives you more pubs than a weekend can reasonably work through. The Victoria Inn runs rotating guest ales and real cider, with a large beer garden that hosts live music outside in summer. The Purple Dog, one of the older taverns in the centre, keeps an award-winning selection of ales, lagers and wines and welcomes dogs. Church Street Tavern puts a bar downstairs and a Michelin-recommended restaurant upstairs, and is known for its Sunday roasts. If you want to see where the beer is made, Other Monkey Brewing pours its own pale ale from a contemporary taproom, and Three Wise Monkeys runs a weekend bottomless brunch of prosecco, craft beer and G&T. The Playhouse, the local Wetherspoon, occupies a converted theatre and has kept the original stage and balcony.

Oysters, Lanes and Roman Walls

The town was famous for its oysters long before any of this. Native oysters from the Colne fishery and nearby Mersea Island have been prized since Roman and Tudor times, prised open and eaten for so many centuries that the Romans burned the shells in their lime kilns. For less historic shopping, the Dutch Quarter and the lanes around Eld Lane and Trinity Street hold the independent shops, alongside a full market and high street.

For walking, the Roman wall circuit follows the line of the first-century town defences for roughly two miles, with substantial upstanding stretches along Balkerne Hill and behind Castle Park. The Balkerne Gate at one end is the largest and oldest surviving Roman gateway in Britain. From Castle Park the riverside paths drop down to the Colne, below the Norman castle and the wall remains.

Castle Above the Temple

That castle is the reason to slow down. Begun around 1076 and finished by about 1100, it is the largest Norman keep ever built in Europe, and it sits on the vaulted foundations of the Temple of Claudius — Britain's largest classical temple, which Tacitus called the "stronghold of everlasting domination." The keep now houses the town's Roman collections. All of this stands on Camulodunum, the first capital of Roman Britain and the oldest recorded town in the country, which Boudica's rebels burned to the ground around AD 60. Archaeologists still find the ash.

Arriving and Looking North

Trains from the mainline station reach London Liverpool Street in about an hour, and the A12 bypasses the town on its way between London and Ipswich. Dedham Vale, the Constable country of Flatford Mill, is a short drive north.

Jumbo Above the Town

Above it all stands Jumbo, a 110-foot red-brick water tower finished in 1883, named for its size and once topped with an elephant weathervane. It has outlasted the elephant.