Why Derry Is Such a Walkable City

Visitors ask how best to get around Derry. The honest answer is that you do not really need to get around at all. You walk.

For its size, Derry is about as walkable as a city gets on this island, and that is no accident. The shape the walls gave the place in 1613 is still the shape of the city today, and it is a small, tight, human-sized shape. Almost everything a visitor comes here for sits inside those walls or a few minutes below them. Here is why the city works so well on foot, and how to make the most of it.

The centre is smaller than you think

The walled city is barely half a mile across. You can cross it corner to corner in about ten minutes, and that is at a browsing pace with a coffee in your hand.

Rough walking times from Guildhall Square, where most of our walks begin:

• The Peace Bridge: 2 minutes
• The Tower Museum: 3 minutes
• The Diamond, the crossroads at the centre of the walled city: 5 minutes, uphill
• Waterloo Street and its trad bars: 6 minutes
• St Columb's Cathedral: 10 minutes
• Free Derry Corner and the Bogside murals: 10 minutes, downhill
• Ebrington Square, across the river: 10 minutes

There is not a sight on that list you need a bus for, and no reason to move the car once it is parked.

The walls are a mile of footpath above the traffic

Most cities give you pavements. Derry gives you a raised walkway a mile long, finished in 1618, that loops the whole old town.

These are the only complete circuit of city walls left in Ireland, and they are a public right of way rather than a museum exhibit behind a rope. You walk along the top of them, up on 26-foot ramparts, with the Bogside laid out on one side and the Guildhall and the river on the other. No traffic, no crossings, no waiting at lights. Just the city turning slowly underneath you.

The full loop is about a mile and takes most people an hour to ninety minutes with stops. It is also the best orientation you will get anywhere: an hour up there and you will know where everything is for the rest of your stay. That is exactly why our Derry Walls walking tour is the one we tell first-time visitors to do first.

The river gave the city a second walking route

In 2011 the Peace Bridge opened across the Foyle, and it was built for people rather than cars. It is a curving, S-shaped footbridge, it takes about five minutes to cross at an amble, and it links Guildhall Square with Ebrington, the old army barracks on the far bank that is now a square, a brewery and a stretch of open riverside.

That one bridge changed how the city is walked. Before it, the far bank meant a car or a bus. Now it is a stroll after dinner, and the quays on both sides give you flat, paved, uninterrupted river walking in either direction.

The hills are real, but they are short

We would rather be straight with you than sell you a lie about a flat city. There are hills in Derry, because the old town sits on one.

Shipquay Street, running from Guildhall Square up to the Diamond, is the steepest street in the city and it is a proper pull. The good news is that it is over in about four minutes. The Bogside sits below the walls, so the walk down to Free Derry Corner is easy and the walk back up is the bit to plan for. Getting up onto the walls themselves means a few short flights of steps at most access points.

None of it lasts. Nothing in the centre is far enough away for a hill to become a slog, and there is a bench, a café or a view at the top of every one of them.

You can leave the car where it is

Park once on arrival and forget about it. Almost everything within a fifteen-minute walk of Guildhall Square is the whole visit: the walls, the Guildhall, the Bogside, the murals, the museums, the bars and the bridge.

Arriving without a car works just as well. The coach station sits on the walled-city side of the river, a few minutes from the Guildhall, and the railway station is over on the Waterside with a short hop across the water to the centre. If you are still working out how to get here, we have written up every way into Derry separately.

It rains, and it barely matters

This is the north west of Ireland, so yes, it rains. What saves you is the distances. A shower that would ruin a day of walking in a big city is a ten-minute wait in a doorway here, or an excuse for a coffee, and then you are back out in it.

Bring a light rain jacket and comfortable shoes and you will be grand. Our walks run rain or shine, and some of the best light on the walls comes just after a shower has passed through.

If you have mobility needs

The flat ground is genuinely flat. The Bogside, Guildhall Square, the quays and the Peace Bridge approach are level, paved and easy going, and a walk that stays down at river and Bogside level takes in Free Derry Corner, the People's Gallery, the Guildhall and the bridge without a single step.

The walls are the harder part, because most access points involve steps. Verify which walls access points are currently step-free or ramped, and whether the Guildhall lift route is open to the public. Tell us what you need when you book and we will plan a route around it. That is exactly what a bespoke walk is for.

The half day we would give a friend

If you want the walkable city in one go, this is the loop:

1. Start in Guildhall Square and get your bearings.
2. Up onto the walls near Magazine Gate and round the full circuit, an hour or so with stops.
3. Come off at Butcher Gate and drop down into the Bogside for Free Derry Corner and the People's Gallery murals.
4. Back up by the gentler route to Waterloo Street for a pint and, most nights, a session.
5. Finish across the Peace Bridge at Ebrington as the light goes.

That is roughly three miles all in, and half a day at a civilised pace. There is no other city we know where you can take in fifteen hundred years of history, a world-famous set of murals and a trad session on foot, without ever once checking a timetable.

Why walking it matters here

In a lot of cities, walking is just how you get between the things you came to see. In Derry the walking is the thing.

Free Derry Corner sits maybe three hundred yards from the walls above it. Standing on those walls, looking down at that gable wall, and then walking the distance between the two yourself is the difference between reading about this city and understanding it. No car gets you that, and no bus tour does either.

So bring the shoes. Everything else here is within reach of them, and if you would like someone to point out what you are walking past, our guided walking tours of Derry run Friday to Monday, all year round, in English, Spanish or French.