The sun did go down not long after I climbed aboard the East Coast train out of King’s Cross Station, minus my suitcase, which was stranded in Los Angeles. The coach was achingly cramped, and my seat mates gossiped incessantly about their fellow lawyers, wherever it was that they worked.

St. Aidan’s College (one of 16 university colleges scattered around Durham) was modern and spare; it could have been in Wisconsin. I went to bed longing for California. Or Toulouse.

But the next day, when I threw back the curtains in my chilly room, the sunshine was alluring and brilliant. St. Aidan’s, it turned out, was on a hill overlooking Durham Cathedral, a distant stony point in a landscape shivering with green. I had a day to myself, and a day is perfect for exploring this compact town.

Durham is not much of an international tourism destination, perhaps because Shakespeare, Wordsworth, Dickens and J. K. Rowling are all from elsewhere (though Durham Cathedral did stand in for Hogwarts in the first two Harry Potter movies). Even those paradigmatic northerners, the Brontës, grew up 90 miles to the southwest of Durham. What might get you off the East Coast train before Edinburgh is the lost-in-time peacefulness of the broad landscape and the picturesque homeliness of Durham itself, which was founded in 995 by monks who were carrying the remains of St. Cuthbert, one of England’s first native-born saints, from Lindisfarne to this peninsula safe within the embrace of the looping Wear River. The monks had been carrying the remains off and on for 120 years, doing their best to avoid Viking attacks. Legend has it that when the bier became impossible to lift, the monks happened upon a woman looking for her dun cow, who led them, now miraculously able to lift the bier, to the current site.