A saintly trip back in time

By JOHN LEE

Although not a visitor hot-spot like other historic English towns, St Albans, just outside London, has at least as much to offer as some of its better-known rivals. In comparison, Bath is often overrun with tourists, York is too far to travel and Canterbury has fewer interesting sites.

Whatever its merits as a tourist town, there is no doubt St Albans has a rich history to tell. The town was the site of Verulamium, Britain's third-largest Roman settlement. It is also where the Magna Carta was drafted and boasts the oldest pub in the world. England's only pope, Nicholas Breakespeare, was born in St Albans and a 14th-century French king was imprisoned here.

The beauty of St Albans today is that much of this ancient heritage is celebrated and its historic sites are easily accessible.

The first site I visited on my whirlwind tour, on a brilliant blue-skied winter's day, was the cathedral and abbey church of St Alban. This giant 1000-year-old structure, which claims to have the longest nave in Europe, dominates the town's skyline.

The centre of the area's influence for centuries, the abbey now seems like a sleeping giant, too large for the quiet market town where it resides.

An architectural marvel combining an unlikely kaleidoscope of features, from Norman to Victorian neo-gothic, the abbey was built in 1077, 11 years after the Battle of Hastings. But its story began in the year 209, with a dissenting Roman soldier from Verulamium named Alban.

With religious non-conformity punishable by death in the Roman Empire, Alban converted to Christianity and, after being found out, was taken to a nearby hill and beheaded. Later recognised as Britain's first Christian martyr and canonised, a vast abbey bearing his name was built near the site of his execution, using many of the narrow red bricks from the ruined Roman settlement.

These bricks can be seen today in the abbey's squat central tower, one of the finest surviving Norman structures in the country.

The cavernous abbey was as cool and tranquil as I remembered. With the echoing music of a practising choir and some of the pews occupied by solitary people in silent reflection, I was reminded that this is still a working church.

Now subject to continual restoration, colourful stylised paintings of Bible scenes have been uncovered on many of the building's vast pillars. The stone shrine of St Alban, smashed to pieces during the dissolution of the monasteries, is restored and revered.

My favourite feature of the abbey has always been the creaky wooden steps that lead to a platform overlooking the shrine. As a child, I used to imagine I could see a solitary monk hidden in the shadows taking his turn at keeping a continual watch over Alban's sacred remains.

For a bird's-eye overview of the town, I made my way to the clock tower. Built between 1403 and 1412, this narrow, flint-faced structure is the only free-standing medieval town belfry in England.

It was built to assert its secular freedom in defiance of the nearby abbey. The clock tower enabled the town to mark its own hours and sound a curfew bell, an important expression of political power at the time.

I paid my 25 pence and climbed the narrow, stone staircase towards the top of the tower. Here, to my right, the abbey loomed large, representing the town's past, while on my left the latter-day population was engaged in a more modern preoccupation.

Shoppers have been coming to St Albans' twice-weekly street market since it was established more than 1000 years ago. Starting life as a farmers' buy-and-sell, today's colourful market runs the length of St Peter's St, the town's main thoroughfare.

It now resembles an elongated outdoor department store, with more than 170 stalls offering antiques, second-hand books, fresh fish, shoe repairs, fruit and vegetables and gourmet pastries.

After snacking on a peppery, brie-stuffed tart and packing away a lattice-topped spinach pie for later, I headed in search of more of the town's ancient history.

I found that although St Albans wears its medieval heritage on its sleeve, with many important sites from the middle-ages accessible throughout the town, it is easy to overlook the far earlier Roman presence.

While the centrally located Museum of St Albans adequately covers the town's history over the past 1000 years, I had to take a trip to the other end of town to uncover the area's pre-medieval, Roman heritage.

Historians believe the settlement of Verulamium was a vital outpost of the Roman Empire. The sophisticated town that stood here before the abbey was even imagined housed hundreds of people in dozens of palatial brick homes. There were also shops, temples and paved roads in a town which stood for 300 years.

The ruined site of the town is now protected in the 40ha Verulamium Park, its gentle green hills marking the foundations that lie just beneath the grassy surface. The only exposed evidence of the ancient town is a crumbling stretch of fortified wall and a bare stone outline of its London gateway. I found it hard to superimpose on this an image of the bustling settlement that once stood here.

A visit to the recently expanded Verulamium Museum quickly solved that problem. Featuring hundreds of examples of the everyday minutiae of Roman life, the museum is packed with coins, toys, clay pipes, glass vases, fine jewellery and decorated earthenware pots. Descriptions are vivid and the museum has contextualised its artefacts by placing them in recreated Roman rooms depicting typical scenes of the day.

The museum also houses some of the most fantastic floor mosaics discovered intact outside the Mediterranean. Carefully recovered from the long-buried remains of villas owned by Verulamium's most affluent citizens, these highly patterned, intricately detailed mosaics depict stylised Roman gods and fanciful scenes from nature.

A few steps away, near St Michael's Church, is the Roman theatre, the only one of the period open to visitors in Britain. Like a reclining skeleton, the ruined site is only a vague outline of the structure that once stood there, but the museum visit had fuelled my imagination.

As the sun began to set, I sat on a grass bank facing the stage area and briefly imagined a chattering audience awaiting the next glittering performance.

After a day rich with imagination, my final task was more practical. Dozens of inns were built in St Albans over the centuries to service the horse-drawn coaches that passed through the town daily, most running to or from London.

Many of these older pubs still operate and some even retain their ancient coaching yards and stable buildings. Although its population is just 60,000, modern-day St Albans still has more than 50 pubs. To learn of their past, I took a self-guided one-hour walking tour with a printed booklet from the local Tourist Information Centre.

My tour included the cosy Tudor-framed Rose and Crown and Six Bells pubs, a short walk from the Roman theatre. Then I returned to the town centre, passing the house-fronted Lower Red Lion and the leaning timber walls of the Tudor Tavern, a large 100-year-old bar in a 400-year-old building.

I learned that the King of France had been briefly imprisoned near the Fleur de Lys pub after his capture at Poitiers in 1356, and a ghostly brigade of Roman soldiers had once been seen marching through the basement of a local inn. As I ended my tour, I was inspired to finish the day with a drink.

Ye Olde Fighting Cocks is reputed to be the oldest public house in the world. Although the building is Tudor in design, the pub was built in 950. The age of the building is shown by the low ceiling at the bar, where I had to stoop to place my order.

As I sat at a dark wooden table in a dimly lit area once used for cock fighting bouts, I reflected on how St Albans continues to celebrate and promote its colourful, sometimes bloodthirsty, heritage. On my next visit, I'll make sure I reserve more than just one day to explore it.

St Albans District Council