York carries 2,000 years in overlapping layers: Legio IX built Eboracum here in 71 CE, Danish Jorvik traded amber and silk from Coppergate, and 1644's siege scarred the walls. Three days follow that sequence, from Roman column to Victorian carriage.
Built 1830 in the grounds of St Mary's Abbey, this holds the Roman city's best finds: the Ivory Bangle Lady skeleton, the Wold Newton hoard and the head of Constantine. Abbey ruins and the Multangular Tower stand outside. Open 10:00, but gardens from 07:30.
Beneath the Roman Bath pub lie the caldarium and frigidarium of the Sixth Legion's fortress baths, found in 1930 during cellar work. Hypocaust pillars, plunge-pool steps and legionary tile stamps sit under glass in a single small room.
William the Conqueror's motte of 1068, crowned by a quatrefoil stone keep of 1245-70. In March 1190 around 150 Jewish residents died here during a siege of the earlier wooden tower. A 2022 deck lets you stand inside the roofless shell.
A hidden parish church reached through an archway off Goodramgate, with rare surviving 17th-century box pews, a sagging uneven floor and 15th-century glass showing the Corpus Christi. Vanishingly little has been restored since 1700.
Britain's railway archive on the site of York's 1877 motive power depot: Mallard, which hit 126 mph in 1938, Stephenson's Rocket replica and Queen Victoria's royal saloon. George Hudson made York a rail capital from the 1840s.
A semi-sunken 1961 No.20 Group Royal Observer Corps HQ, staffed until 1991 to plot nuclear bursts and fallout across Yorkshire. Original perspex plotting screens, decontamination showers and dormitories survive intact.
Housed in the 1780 Female Prison and 1705 Debtors' Prison, with the actual condemned cell of highwayman Dick Turpin, hanged 1739. Kirkgate recreates a Victorian street; the WWI gallery uses local regiment letters.
Thomas Page's 1863 iron bridge replaced a ferry, its parapets cast with York's arms and Victoria's initials. Downstream, Queen's Staith brick warehouses and flood markers record centuries of Ouse trade and inundation.
Built over the 1976-81 Coppergate dig, where waterlogged soil preserved Viking-age timber buildings, leatherwork and a silk cap. A carriage ride passes reconstructed 10th-century Jorvik houses; the gallery shows the excavated finds.
A 1360s townhouse of Nostell Priory, later home to mayor William Snawsell, found in the 1980s hidden inside a derelict office block. The great hall has been returned to its medieval state with horn windows and a screens passage.
Viscount Fairfax's 1762 winter townhouse, remodelled by John Carr and rescued from use as a cinema and dance hall. It holds the Noel Terry collection of Georgian furniture and clocks, arranged as a lived-in season of assemblies.
The 1370 hall of the Minster's Vicars Choral, tucked behind Goodramgate, sits amid the narrow snickelways — Bedern, Hornpot Lane, Mad Alice Lane — that were slum courtyards in 1900 before slum clearance emptied them.