Yorkshire Museum

One of the north's finest collections of Viking, Roman, and medieval artefacts, in a handsome Neoclassical building

The Yorkshire Museum stands in the walled Museum Gardens, its early Victorian Neoclassical facade giving no hint of the quality inside. The collections span Roman York — Eboracum, once the capital of northern Britain — through the Viking age, the medieval period, and into the natural history of the county. The Roman section includes sculptures, mosaics, and personal objects recovered from the fortress and the civilian settlement that grew around it. The Viking exhibits draw on decades of excavation in York, particularly from Coppergate, and sit alongside material from the Jorvik digs.

The Middleham Jewel is the centrepiece of the medieval collection — a piece of extraordinary craftsmanship that somehow spent centuries in the ground before re-emerging almost intact. The museum gardens are free to enter whether or not you visit the museum, and contain the ruins of St Mary's Abbey alongside a Roman tower. There is an admission charge for the museum itself.

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A story
The Middleham Jewel, acquired by the museum in 1992, is a gold pendant set with a large sapphire and decorated with a scene of the Trinity, buried in the ground at Middleham Castle sometime in the late 15th century. Nobody knows who owned it or why it was hidden. At the time of its auction it sold for over £2.5 million, a record for English medieval jewellery, paid jointly by the museum and the V&A.

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