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ROCHESTER was first settled by the Romans, who built a fortress on the site of the present Castle (daily: April-Sept 10am-6pm; Oct 10am-5pm; Nov-March 10am-4pm; £3.60; EH) at the northwest end of the High Street; some kind of fortification has remained here ever since. In 1077, William I gave Gundulf, architect of the White Tower at the Tower of London, the see of Rochester and the job of improving the defences on the Medway's northernmost bridge on Watling Street. The castle remains one of the best-preserved examples of a Norman fortress in England. The stark 100-foot-high keep glowers over the town, while its interior is all the better for having lost its floors, allowing clear views up and down the dank interior. It has three square towers and one cylindrical (the southwest), which was rebuilt following its collapse during the siege of 1215, when the bankrupt King John eventually wrested the castle from its archbishop. The outer walls and two of the towers retain their corridors and spiral stairwells, allowing access to the uppermost battlements.

The foundations of the adjacent Cathedral (daily 7.30am-6pm; free) were also Gundulf's work, but the building has been much modified over the past nine hundred years. Plenty of Norman touches have endured, particularly in the west front, with its pencil-shaped towers, blind arcading and richly carved portal and tympanum above the doorway. Norman round arches, decorated with zigzags and made from lovely honey-coloured Caen stone, also line the nave. The cathedral once enshrined the remains of one St William of Perth, a pious baker from Scotland, who in 1201 embarked on a pilgrimage to the Holy Land, but got only as far as Rochester, where he was murdered and robbed. The monks of Rochester, envying the popular appeal of St Thomas à Becket's shrine at nearby Canterbury, used William's demise as an opportunity to establish a rival shrine - indeed, substantial additions to the cathedral were financed by donations from pilgrims paying their respects to the canonized baker's tomb, which has long since disappeared. Some fine paintings which survived the Dissolution of the Monasteries decorate the interior, most notably on the walls of the choir where the thirteenth-century depiction of the Wheel of Fortune (only half of which survives) is shown as a treadmill, a trenchant image of medieval life's relentless slog.

Rochester's most famous son is Charles Dickens , who spent his youth around here but would seem to have been less than impressed by the place - it appears in two of his novels as "Mudfog" and "Dullborough". Many town buildings, such as the Royal Victoria and Bull Hotel at the top of the High Street, also feature in his novels, while most of his last book, the unfinished Mystery of Edwin Drood , was set here. A gritty picture of Victorian life is conjured up by the tableaux at the Charles Dickens Centre in Eastgate House at the east end of the High Street (daily: April-Sept 10am-6pm; Oct-March 10am-4pm; £3.70; ). Key scenes from his well-known books are enacted at the push of a button and the whole place is entertaining and informative whether you're a Dickens enthusiast or not. Further down the High Street stands Watts' Charity (March-Oct Tues-Sat 2pm-5pm; free), a sixteenth-century almshouse featuring galleried Elizabethan bedrooms and immortalized in Dickens' short story The Seven Poor Travellers .

Not all town museums are worth close scrutiny, but Rochester's excellent Guildhall Museum , at the castle end of the High Street (daily 10am-4.30pm; free; ), is an exception. Inside, you'll find a vivid model of King John's siege of the castle and a chilling exhibition on the prison ships or hulks once moored near the Medway towns. Following American independence from Britain in 1776, England was stuck for a place to transport her growing numbers of convicts - an increase caused as much by desperate poverty and draconian sentencing as any wave of criminality. Until the new penal colony of Botany Bay was established a decade or so later, criminals were housed in appalling and overcrowded conditions inside decommissioned naval vessels moored in the Thames. With the clever use of mirrors the exhibit replicates the grim nightmare inside these floating prisons.