Exeter

Semper Fidelis runs Exeter’s motto, Ever Faithful, and the city has long kept faith with its past. The Dumnonii were here before the Romans built Isca Dumnoniorum on the hill above the Exe, and the Roman wall still draws the city’s outline nearly 2,000 years later.

Faithful has never meant meek, mind. Exeter held out against William the Conqueror for eighteen days, and when a 15th-century merchant’s house stood in the way of a new road in the 1960s, the city simply put it on wheels and moved it.

It’s easy to treat Exeter as a stop on the road to Dartmoor or the coast, with a look round the cathedral and a cream tea (cream first, naturally) before moving on. VoiceMap’s self-guided audio tours give that cathedral its due, from the longest continuous medieval stone vault in the world to the spectral nun said to glide across the Green, but they also lead you down Stepcote Hill to the quay where the cloth trade made Exeter’s fortune. And if the catacombs give you a chill, just hit pause.

Pop in your earbuds and let the Ever Faithful city keep you company, at your own pace.