Visiting Chester

Whilst we were staying in Port Sunlight David and I walked to the Port Sunlight Railway Station which was only a few minutes walk through the beautiful village from Joe & Emily's house, from there we caught the train to Chester which was about 30 minutes away. Chester was an old Roman city and it still has a wall surrounding part of the city as you can see in the photo on the left. The wall was originally built about 1900 years ago and it is still a complete wall today, although they have had to do a few repairs throughout the years! We walked almost all the way around and it gives you a great view of the city both in and outside the walls, it follows the River Dee in parts and we also walked past the Chester Racecourse which was preparing for a race meeting a couple of days later. It was practically in the middle of the town, very handy for a big day at the races, the course and the grandstands looked magnificent. We visited the huge Anglican Cathedral in Chester, there were blokes digging in the front yard of the Cathedral, I thought they were putting in a new footpath but it turns out they were actually archeologists and they showed us some old tiles that they had just dug up! The Cathedral was so huge, shaped like a cross, it had these huge murals which must have been 5 or 6 metres high and may be 20 metres or more long, they were all made of marble and the tiles were tiny, it was just amazing. They also had on display a really small painting, maybe about 3" x 4" which was painted on a web made by caterpillars, it was very fine and the painting was very intricate and like most other things over here it was very old!! The Cathedral had a guided walk where we just wore these earphones and when you went near something of interest it started to tell us about it. When we had finished checking out the Cathedral we had lunch in the old Monks Refectory, which itself was a huge church like room complete with stain glass windows that would have been like you would see in any church and coats of arms on the ceiling, I can't believe all the trouble they went to in the olden days, hopefully some of the monks looked up and appreciated the efforts whilst they were eating their tea! The streets of Chester were filled with beautiful old shops, cobbled streets, narrow with no cars in a lot of them as well as some bigger department stores. David lost his green WFI beanie as we were wandering around, so someone in Chester will probably by now be doing some free advertising for Wesfarmers Federation Insurance. We thought Chester was a beautiful old city and well worth the visit.