Durham Audio Tour: Hands That Built Durham

Explore Durham at your own pace

Durham's skyline belongs to the cathedral and the castle. The rest of the city belongs to a different story - the Norman masons who signed their stones with a chisel mark, the boy choristers educated in exchange for their voices, the Bishop's kitchen staff who fed five hundred in a hall built around hierarchy, the medieval bridge-builders who raised Framwellgate and Elvet for the pilgrims and the traders, the market stallholders who gathered under Bishop Pudsey's charter, the 150,000 Durham miners who pooled their wages to build their own parliament on Redhills Lane, and the secretary William Crawford who made the Durham Miners' Association the largest miners' union in Britain. These are the people whose labour made the peninsula possible - and whose names rarely appear on any plaque.

Photo: Jeffrey Zhang, Unsplash

Tour details

• Duration: 1 hour 27 minutes, entirely at your own pace
• Distance: around 4.1 km (2.5 miles)
• Stops: 11 landmarks, including Durham Indoor Market, Durham Market Place, Elvet Bridge
• Audio: up to 28 minutes of narration
• Starts at: Durham Indoor Market

Map data by Mapbox and OpenStreetMap contributors

How it works

• Book here and a redemption code arrives by email within minutes.
• Download the free AudaTours app on your phone and enter the code.
• Download the tour once and the whole thing works offline.
• Walk to the first stop and press play. The audio for each landmark starts automatically as you approach it, so your phone can stay in your pocket.

There is no fixed date and no start time. The date you pick at checkout does not matter, and the tour stays on your phone permanently, so you can use it whenever you next visit and walk it again as often as you like.

What is included

• Professionally narrated audio that plays automatically at each stop
• An interactive map showing the walking route between landmarks
• Full offline access once downloaded, so you need no data or signal
• Freedom to start, pause and resume whenever you like
• Lifetime access - your code never expires

Where you will stop

• Durham Indoor Market
• Durham Market Place
• Elvet Bridge
• St Oswald's Church, Durham
• Prebends Bridge Durham
• Durham Castle
• Palace Green Durham
• Galilee Chapel Durham Cathedral
• Framwellgate Bridge Durham
• Durham railway station
• Redhills Durham Miners Hall

Image: AudaTours

What is AudaTours?

AudaTours turns a walk through a city into a story. Our guides bring landmarks to life with the history, the scandals and the detail you would never get from a plaque.

• Immersive: real stories about the places in front of you, not a dry commentary
• Offline: download once and use it with no data, anywhere
• At your own pace: start, pause and resume whenever you want
• Accurate: every story is built from verified historical sources and checked before release

Good to know

• This is a self-guided audio tour on your own phone. There is no in-person guide.
• It does not include entry to any building or site along the route.
• The landmarks on the tour are not affiliated with AudaTours.
• You need a smartphone with Android 7.0 or later, or iOS 16 or later.
• Bring headphones and start with a charged phone.

Who it suits

Solo travellers, couples, families and small groups who would rather explore on their own schedule than follow a guide and a fixed departure time. It suits a first visit, and it suits anyone who has already seen the famous sights and wants to know what actually happened in them.

Image credits

Photos: Jeffrey Zhang (Unsplash); AudaTours.