ttlemented
wall, and we discover that only through its bars and posterns can we
enter the city, and feast our eyes on the relics of the Middle Ages
within. It is no dummy wall put up to please visitors, for right down
to the siege of 1644, when the Parliamentary army battered Walmgate Bar
with their artillery, it has withstood many assaults and investments.
Repairs and restorations have been carried out at various times during
the last century, and additional arches have been inserted by the bars
and where openings have been made necessary, luckily without robbing
the walls of their picturesqueness or interest. The bright, creamy
colour of the stonework is a pleasant reminder of the purity of York's
atmosphere, for should the smoke of the city ever increase to the
extent of even the smaller manufacturing towns, the beauty and glamour
of every view would gradually disappear.

Of the Roman legionary base called Eboracum there still remain parts of
the wall and the lower portion of a thirteen-sided angle bastion while
embedded in the medieval earthen ramparts there is a great deal of
Roman walling.

The four chief gateways and the one or two posterns and towers have
each a particular fascination, and when we begin to taste the joys of
York, we cannot decide whether the Minster, the gateways, the narrow
streets full of overhanging houses, or the churches, all of which we
know from prints and pictures, call us most. In our uncertainty we
reach a wide arch across the roadway, and on the inner side find a
flight of stone steps leading to the top of the wall. We climb them,
and find spread out before us our first notable view of the city. The
battlemented stone parapet of the wall stops at a tower standing on the
bank of the river, and on the further side rises another, while above
the old houses, closely packed together beyond Lendal Bridge, appear
the stately towers of the Minster.

On the plan of keeping the best wine until the last, we turn our backs
to the Minster and go along the wall, trying to imagine the scene when
open country came right up to encircling fortifications, and within
were to be found only the picturesque houses of the fourteenth and
fifteenth centuries, many of them new in those days, and yet so
admirably designed as to be beautiful without the additional charm of
age. Then, suddenly, we find no need to imagine any longer, having
reached the splendid twelfth-century structure of Micklegate Bar. Its
b