Windsor travel guide, in your ear

Windsor is a small English town that has spent nearly a thousand years in the shadow of a castle. It sits on the Thames, just twenty miles west of London, a huddle of old streets beneath grey stone walls and round towers. Kings and queens have lived on the hill above it since William the Conqueror, and the town grew up quietly at their gate, proud, polished, and thoroughly royal.

William raised the first castle here in the 1070s, a ring of earth and timber guarding the river approach to London. Over the centuries his wooden fort became the vast stone palace you see today, the largest inhabited castle on earth, and a favourite home of the royal family. The place mattered so much that in 1917, during the First World War, the king took its name for his own: the House of Windsor. The family has been called Windsor ever since.

The town lives by the rhythm of the castle. Guardsmen in scarlet march through the streets to change the watch, and the flag on the Round Tower tells you whether the King is at home. Cross the bridge and you reach Eton, with its famous old school; turn the other way and the town dissolves into a great royal park of oak woods and grazing deer.

A few things you should not miss. Inside the walls stands St George's Chapel, where kings and queens lie buried, from Henry the Eighth to Elizabeth the Second. From the castle gates the Long Walk, a magnificent avenue, runs nearly three miles beneath the trees to a statue of a king on horseback. And across the water, boys in tailcoats still stream between Eton's ancient buildings.

End the day by the river as the light softens and the castle turns golden above the rooftops. A swan drifts past, a bell sounds from the chapel, and the great walls that have watched over this town for a thousand years settle into the dusk. Windsor is small, and it knows exactly what it is: England's home town for its kings and queens.