Building or ruin
Central Government War Headquarters
Wiltshire
A vast underground city built for 4,000 people to survive a nuclear war in total isolation was hidden inside a Bath stone quarry for decades before…
By type
Buildings & ruins of Britain & Ireland
Page 4 of 14.
Search and filters apply to these 100 places.
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Building or ruin · Pictish & early medieval
Cerne Abbas Giant
Dorset
The Cerne Giant is one of England’s best-known hill figures, a monumental chalk image whose striking design and unresolved origins continue to driv…
- Near Cerne Abbas
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Iron Age
Chalbury Hillfort
Dorset
Chalbury Hillfort is a strategically placed settlement enclosure from the centuries before Rome arrived, with storage pits, hut platforms, burial m…
- Near Bincombe
- Some walking
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Ancient place
Chance's Glassworks
West Midlands
The glass made behind these walls once lit two thousand three hundred lighthouses and glazed both the Crystal Palace and the Houses of Parliament.
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Chapel of St Fyndoca
Argyll and Bute
A carved grave-slab bearing arms for a galley and a boar's head ties this island ruin to the Campbells of Lochow, in a graveyard still used eight c…
- Near Cladich
- Rough ground
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Building or ruin · Roman
Charterhouse (Roman town)
Somerset
The only amphitheatre in England at a lead mine: 32 metres by 24, its seating banks still standing 4.5 metres above the arena floor.
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Building or ruin · Roman
Cheddar Palace
Somerset
A royal hunting lodge where the great council of England met three times in the tenth century: now marked out in concrete slabs on a school field.
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Building or ruin · Roman
Chedworth Roman Villa
Gloucestershire
A 2017 discovery showed new mosaic work here was laid after AD 424: proof that Roman-style luxury and craft skill persisted in Britain decades long…
- Near Gloucester
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Medieval
Chepstow Port Wall
Monmouthshire
A single controlled gateway through 1,100 metres of stone wall let a medieval lord tax every trader entering Chepstow's market and port at once.
- Easy path
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Fortified place · Iron Age
Cherbury Camp
Oxfordshire
An Iron Age enclosure larger than Uffington Castle yet built on flat, marshy ground with no hill in sight: and the unlikely birthplace of the Pusey…
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Building or ruin · Roman
Chester city walls
Cheshire
Britain's most complete Roman and medieval town wall circuit, still walkable almost end to end: a defence rebuilt, breached and patched across nine…
- Some walking
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Building or ruin · Roman
Chester Roman Amphitheatre
Cheshire
Britain’s largest excavated Roman amphitheatre preserves the arena where Deva Victrix’s legionary city staged military display, ritual and public s…
- Near Chester
- Easy path
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Building or ruin · Roman
Chesterfield, Derbyshire
Derbyshire
A short-lived Roman garrison gave a Derbyshire market town its very name, and its church spire has leaned crooked for so long the Devil is blamed f…
- Near Bakewell
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Building or ruin · Roman
Chesterton Windmill
Warwickshire
A Grade I windmill of 1632–33 carried on six stone arches, long claimed as an observatory: the estate accounts say otherwise.
- Near Chesterton
- Some walking
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Tomb or burial place · Prehistoric
Chestnuts Long Barrow
Kent
Chestnuts Long Barrow is a ruined Medway Megalith whose chamber held collective Neolithic (the closing Stone Age, roughly 4000–2500 BC) burials, po…
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Building or ruin · Roman
Chew Green
Northumberland
Chew Green is a complex Roman military landscape on Dere Street near the Scottish border, preserving camps, fortlets, a fort, and a section of road…
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Building or ruin · Medieval
Chichele College
Northamptonshire
Its walled garden, laid out in 1425, is a rare survival from an English monastic-era foundation, and the chapel it once served is still used for co…
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Building or ruin · Medieval
Chichester Guildhall
West Sussex
Not a guildhall at all. It is the east end of a Franciscan church, and one of the very few such buildings in England still under a roof.
- Easy path
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Building or ruin · Roman
Chichester to Silchester Way
West Sussex
Entirely lost, with not even a Saxon place name to mark it, until aerial photographs of Milland in 1949 showed the outline of a Roman inn.
- Some walking
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Building or ruin · Roman
Chingle Hall
Lancashire
Chingle Hall is a moated thirteenth-century manor near Preston, retaining its oak door and a sixteenth-century bridge across the surviving moat.
- Near Whittingham
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Fortified place · Iron Age
Chiselbury
Wiltshire
An Iron Age ring fort still flanked by two mysterious cross dykes built to block the very ridge route it commands: with WWI regimental badges later…
- Near Fovant
- Some walking
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Building or ruin · Prehistoric
Church Hill, West Sussex
West Sussex
John Pull dug six of its thirty-six shafts across two campaigns interrupted by the Second World War.
- Near Findon
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Church of St Mary and All Saints, Whalley
Lancashire
Whalley’s Grade I church links Anglo-Saxon crosses, a thirteenth-century parish church and an exceptional collection of medieval and later furnishi…
- Near Whalley
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Church of St Peter, Holton-le-Clay
Lincolnshire
A carved wooden mouse on the altar rail, a Saxon tower arch, and a separately scheduled medieval cross all survive within one small parish churchyard.
- Near Holton-le-Clay
- Easy path
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Building or ruin · Roman
Chysauster Ancient Village
Cornwall
A remarkably legible Romano-British (Britain under Roman rule, AD 43–410) farming village where rows of courtyard houses preserve the layout of a c…
- Near Penzance
- Some walking
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Building or ruin · Roman
Cirencester Amphitheatre
Gloucestershire
The second-largest amphitheatre in Roman Britain, built for a town second in size only to Londinium, later refortified as a Saxon-era stronghold.
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Prehistoric
Cissbury Ring
West Sussex
Around 270 shafts were sunk into this hill over three centuries, some twelve metres deep, with galleries running out from the bottom of each.
- Near Findon
- Some walking
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Building or ruin · Medieval
City of Caves
Nottinghamshire
City of Caves lets visitors enter Nottingham’s soft sandstone history, where chambers served medieval workers, later tanners, and Second World War…
- Some walking
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Ancient place · Prehistoric
Cladh Hallan
Outer Hebrides
Cladh Hallan is an ancient settlement on South Uist, notable for mummified bodies that were preserved and later reburied.
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Building or ruin · Medieval
Clarendon Palace
Wiltshire
It was here in 1164 that Henry II drafted the Constitutions of Clarendon, a challenge to Church authority whose fallout led to Becket's murder six…
- Some walking
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Building or ruin · Roman
Clausentum
Hampshire
A river bend did the work of a rampart (the raised bank thrown up around a fortified enclosure) here: the promontory site was fortified twice over,…
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Fortified place · Medieval
Clawdd-du
Monmouthshire
Clawdd-du preserves Monmouth’s medieval outer defence for Overmonnow: a broad, potentially floodable ditch and palisade that protected a Welsh-side…
- Near Monmouth
- Easy path
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Building or ruin · Medieval
Clayton Hall
Greater Manchester
Clayton Hall is a rare surviving medieval moated manor in Manchester, preserving a 15th-century wing, the Clayton–Byron–Chetham story and a volunte…
- Near Winchester
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Fortified place · Iron Age
Clearbury Ring
Wiltshire
A single bank-and-ditch settlement above the Avon valley holds a Stone Age hand axe far older than the earthwork (a bank, ditch or mound shaped fro…
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Iron Age
Cley Hill
Wiltshire
A chalk down west of Warminster carries an Iron Age (roughly 800 BC until the Roman conquest) fort, two burial mounds and a folklore of devils and…
- Some walking
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Sacred place
Clonard Monastery
County Antrim
Built for Belfast’s growing Catholic working-class population, Clonard became a religious refuge at the Troubles interface and a setting for the qu…
- Near Belfast
- Easy path
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Building or ruin · Iron Age
Clovelly Dykes
Devon
Clovelly Dykes is a large Early Iron Age earthwork (earth moved and shaped into banks and ditches rather than built up in stone) on Devon’s coastal…
- Rough ground
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Settlement · Medieval
Coates medieval settlement
Lincolnshire
Its parish church holds Lincolnshire's only surviving 15th-century rood screen, a rare survival in a village otherwise reduced to earthworks, two f…
- Near Coates
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Medieval
Cockham Wood Fort
Kent
Cockham Wood Fort is a visible Medway shoreline defence built after the 1667 Dutch raid, marking the shift from Upnor Castle to a stronger protecti…
- Near Hoo St Werburgh
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Tomb or burial place · Medieval
Coetan Arthur
Pembrokeshire
A six-metre capstone resting on a single upright near St Davids Head, its chamber of the first farming age collapsed.
- Near St Davids
- Some walking
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Building or ruin · Roman
Coggabata
Cumbria
Excavation showed the fort was rebuilt twice: an earthwork enclosure replaced by a stone one: and its stones later resurfaced in a medieval castle…
- Near Drumburgh
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Settlement · Medieval
Cold Hanworth medieval settlement
Lincolnshire
A whole vanished village survives in the ground here: house plots, a curving street and open-field furrows still traceable beside the church that a…
- Near Cold Hanworth
- Some walking
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Tomb or burial place · Prehistoric
Coldrum Long Barrow
Kent
Coldrum Long Barrow is the best-preserved Medway Megalith, a ruined Early Neolithic tomb-shrine whose chamber held at least 17 people and still anc…
- Near Trottiscliffe
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Sacred place · Medieval
College of All Saints, Maidstone
Kent
Maidstone’s College of All Saints preserves the surviving buildings of a 1395 ecclesiastical college whose Perpendicular architecture, gatehouse an…
- Near Maidstone
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Building or ruin · Prehistoric
Combe Hill, East Sussex
East Sussex
Two millennia apart, people chose this hilltop to bury deliberate offerings: three polished Neolithic (the late Stone Age, roughly 4000–2500 BC in…
- Near Jevington
- Some walking
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Building or ruin · Roman
Combs Ditch
Dorset
Combs Ditch is a scheduled Dorset earthwork (a mound or ditch formed by moving soil, not by building) whose excavated sequence suggests an Iron Age…
- Near Charlton Marshall
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Building or ruin · Roman
Concangis
County Durham
A garrison of ex-soldiers left behind altars to war gods, sun gods, and Celtic deities alike, buried now beneath a modern town that grew directly o…
- Near Chester-le-Street
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Building or ruin · Roman
Condercum
Tyne and Wear
A life-size head of the local god Antenociticus came out of a temple here in 1862, wearing a Celtic neck torc.
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Fortified place · Medieval
Cook Street Gate
West Midlands
One of only two of Coventry's original twelve medieval town gates to survive: and the only one a road still runs through.
- Easy path
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Building or ruin · Roman
Coria (Corbridge)
Northumberland
Coria was a key Roman fort and town at the meeting of Dere Street, the Stanegate (the Roman road running behind Hadrian's Wall), and the Tyne, wher…
- Easy path
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Building or ruin · Roman
Corinium Dobunnorum
Gloucestershire
Its 2nd-century walls enclosed the second-largest city in Roman Britain, and its forum and basilica were bigger than any other in the province bar…
- Easy path
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Building or ruin · Prehistoric
Cow Cave
Devon
Cow Cave is a scheduled limestone cave at Chudleigh Rocks containing significant Paleolithic deposits and investigated in a major 2016 excavation.
- Rough ground
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Fortified place · Iron Age
Coxall Knoll
Shropshire
An Iron Age defended settlement on a 262-metre summit at the Shropshire and Herefordshire boundary.
- Near Bucknell
- Rough ground
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Fortified place · Medieval
Craggaunowen
County Clare
Craggaunowen combines a sixteenth-century tower house with an open-air archaeological museum, using reconstructed Irish buildings and boats to inte…
- Near Quin
- Easy path
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Fortified place · Iron Age
Cranmore Castle
Devon
Cranmore Castle is a large enclosure above Tiverton, dating from from about 800 BC until the Romans came, whose unusual siting raises important que…
- Some walking
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Building or ruin · Prehistoric
Creswell Crags
Derbyshire
Its cave walls carry the northernmost Ice Age art yet found in Europe, engraved by people who timed their work to the one shaft of sunlight that re…
- Near Bakewell
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Building or ruin · Roman
Crofton Roman Villa
Greater London
A working Roman farmhouse rebuilt across 260 years survives with its floors and heating intact, unearthed by accident beneath a council driveway me…
- Near Orpington
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Building or ruin · Roman
Cromwell House
Greater London
Behind its carved brick front stands the finest surviving oak staircase of its kind in London, and for 74 years the house was the first Jewish-owne…
- Easy path
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Fortified place · Medieval
Cromwell's Castle
Cornwall
A Civil War gun tower on Tresco, built to bar hostile ships from New Grimsby harbour and later enlarged for a new imperial conflict.
- Near Penzance
- Some walking
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Building or ruin · Roman
Cross Bath
Somerset
A bath fed by rain that fell on the Mendips and spent its journey four kilometres underground: and a royal birth that got a monument for it.
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Sacred place · Medieval
Crossraguel Abbey
South Ayrshire
A ruined Cluniac monastery near Maybole that still keeps its church, covered walkways and dovecote.
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Sacred place · Prehistoric
Cuckoo Stone
Wiltshire
A squat sarsen lying forgotten in a field turned out, on excavation, to have replaced a wooden post on the very same spot before 2000 BC: a rare ph…
- Easy path
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Fortified place · Medieval
Culzean Castle
South Ayrshire
Eisenhower was given an apartment at the top of this castle in 1945, as a condition of the family handing it to the nation.
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Building or ruin · Roman
Cunetio
Wiltshire
A Roman crossroads town that spent lavishly on 4 m-thick walls and 17 towers at a time when almost no inland British settlement bothered to fortify…
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Ancient place · Prehistoric
Cursus Barrows
Wiltshire
Ground-penetrating radar in 2010 found a hidden ditched enclosure with a possible timber circle beneath one of the barrows: briefly reported as Sto…
- Easy path
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Building or ruin · Medieval
Curtain Theatre
Greater London
The Curtain Theatre was London’s second playhouse and a leading Shakespearean venue, now archaeologically revealed as a rectangular theatre whose s…
- Easy path
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Building or ruin · Prehistoric
Cwmystwyth Mines
Ceredigion
A single hillside preserves nearly every phase of British metal mining in one place, from Bronze Age (roughly 2500–800 BC, when metal tools first s…
- Near Cwmystwyth
- Rough ground
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Sacred place · Medieval
Cymer Abbey
Gwynedd
Cymer Abbey is a modest Cistercian foundation at the meeting of waters, whose plain surviving church reveals both regional monastic life and the pr…
- Near Dolgellau
- Easy path
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Carved stone · Medieval
Dacre's Cross
North Yorkshire
Dacre’s Cross preserves a fifteenth-century object whose contested history keeps the Battle of Towton, chapel, boundary and memorial traditions in…
- Easy path
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Building or ruin · Roman
Dalton Parlours Roman villa
West Yorkshire
Anglo-Saxon builders put up their own structures here out of the villa's stone, and a grave of the seventh century was cut into the same ground.
- Near Wakefield
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Fortified place · Iron Age
Danebury
Hampshire
Twenty seasons of excavation under Barry Cunliffe turned this single Hampshire hillfort, an Iron Age: the centuries before Rome arrived: settlement…
- Some walking
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Tomb or burial place · Iron Age
Danes Graves
East Riding of Yorkshire
More than seventy barrows and 114 recorded skeletons make this one of the largest known Arras Culture cemeteries, including one of Yorkshire's rare…
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Crossing or structure · Medieval
Daresbury (Mersey flat)
Cheshire
A sunken 18th-century sailing barge in a Cheshire lock is the only known pre-1840 survivor of a boat type that once worked every waterway in northw…
- Near Chester
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Building or ruin · Medieval
Deer Abbey
Aberdeenshire
Its earlier community is the one recorded in the margins of the Book of Deer, one of Scotland's oldest surviving manuscripts, making this ruin a ra…
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Denbigh Friary
Denbighshire
A Carmelite friary, a house of friars who worked among townspeople rather than withdrawing from them, whose walls survived Henry VIII's closure of…
- Near Denbigh
- Rough ground
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Building or ruin · Roman
Derby Racecourse Roman settlement
Derbyshire
Excavations showed Roman Derby extended beyond the fort at Little Chester into a civilian settlement across the river, still lying buried beneath t…
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Building or ruin · Roman
Derventio Brigantum
North Yorkshire
A single altar and a unique inscription about an inherited goldsmith's shop are almost all that name the people who actually lived and worked insid…
- Easy path
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Building or ruin · Roman
Derventio Coritanorum
Derbyshire
One fort site lived three separate military lives across nearly 300 years before becoming a walled industrial town supplying pottery, iron and lead…
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Building or ruin · Roman
Deva Victrix
Cheshire
An oval building unlike any other found in the Roman Empire sat at its heart, and the fortress itself was built larger than York or Caerleon: hints…
- Near Chester
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Devenish Island
County Fermanagh
At its peak this remote lough island held as many as 1,500 monastic scholars, and its round tower, carved crosses and Viking-era history still stan…
- Near Enniskillen
- Some walking
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Carved stone · Prehistoric
Devil's Arrows
North Yorkshire
The Devil’s Arrows are among Britain’s tallest standing stones and an exceptional lowland Neolithic (the first farming period in Britain, roughly 4…
- Easy path
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Fortified place · Iron Age
Devil's Dyke, Hertfordshire
Hertfordshire
The surviving western ditch is one of the strongest candidates for the stronghold where Julius Caesar defeated the British king Cassivellaunus in 5…
- Near Hertford
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Tomb or burial place · Prehistoric
Devil's Humps, Stoughton
West Sussex
No records survive from the early excavations, so nobody knows exactly when these barrows were built: or what was taken out of them.
- Near Stoughton
- Some walking
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Tomb or burial place · Prehistoric
Devil's Jumps, Treyford
West Sussex
The line of five is aligned on sunset at midsummer. Local folklore has the Devil hopping along them until Thor threw a stone at him.
- Near Treyford
- Some walking
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More places
Briefer entries: recorded and worth knowing, with fuller pages to come.
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Building or ruin · Roman
Chanctonbury Ring
West Sussex
A defended hilltop crowning Chanctonbury Hill, with burial mounds and dykes around it recording activity from four thousand years ago onwards.
- Some walking
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Sacred place · Prehistoric
Chapel Carn Brea
Cornwall
A granite hill where Neolithic tombs: from the late Stone Age, roughly 4000–2500 BC in Britain: and Bronze Age remains: roughly 2500–800 BC: share…
- Near St Just
- Some walking
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Building or ruin · Medieval
Charlcotte Furnace
shropshire
Richard Knight of Bringewood Ironworks was leasing this blast furnace as early as 1712, and it may have been running since the 1690s.
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Settlement · Iron Age
Chisenbury Camp
Wiltshire
Excavated pottery, worked stone and human burial remains now sit in Devizes Museum, the clearest surviving trace of an Iron Age (from around 800 BC…
- Near Upavon
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Tomb or burial place · Prehistoric
Chûn Quoit
Cornwall
A remarkably intact Neolithic chamber tomb: from the closing Stone Age, roughly 4000–2500 BC: whose capstone still stands in its original position…
- Near Pendeen
- Rough ground
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Building or ruin · Roman
Cilurnum
northumberland
The fort walls push north of Hadrian's Wall, with three main gates on the far side: built not to hold the frontier but to get cavalry through it qu…
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Ancient tree · Medieval
Cloughmore
Down
Cloughmore pairs 10,000-year-old glacial transport with a mountain legend: one huge boulder gives Rostrevor both a geological landmark and a Fionn…
- Near Rostrevor
- Some walking
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Building or ruin · Roman
Coed-y-Caerau
newport
Three linked Iron Age earthworks: from the centuries before the Roman conquest: and a Roman fortlet on one Monmouthshire ridge, unexcavated, with C…
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Sacred place · Prehistoric
Coffin Stone
Kent
The Coffin Stone is a striking Medway megalith whose possible long barrow, a prehistoric burial mound, origin remains unresolved after excavation s…
- Near Aylesford
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Fortified place · Prehistoric
Condolden
Cornwall
Tintagel parish's highest point, where an unexcavated Bronze Age barrow: roughly 2500–800 BC, when metalworking spread, and a prehistoric burial mo…
- Near Tintagel
- Some walking
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Building or ruin · Roman
Cowbridge (Roman town)
The Vale of Glamorgan
Bricks stamped by the Second Legion, recovered from a Roman bath house beneath the modern town of Cowbridge, are among the earliest hints that sold…
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Tomb or burial place · Prehistoric
Crawley Edge Cairns
County Durham
A Weardale cairnfield where Bronze Age (roughly 2500–800 BC, when metal tools first spread) burial practice and evidence of early field clearance o…
- Near Bishop Auckland
- Some walking
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Building or ruin · Medieval
Cross at Croes Llwyd Farm
monmouthshire
One of only two crosses in Monmouthshire to keep its head through the iconoclasm of 1643, out of seventy-nine: and the survival is credited to its…
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Tomb or burial place · Pictish & early medieval
Darenth Country Park
Kent
Darenth Country Park protects a Saxon burial ground within a former hospital landscape, combining nationally important archaeology with chalk-grass…
- Near Dartford
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Building or ruin · Roman
Dere Street
Northumberland
Dere Street was Rome’s principal northern communications and supply route from York through Corbridge and beyond Hadrian’s Wall into Scotland, with…
- Some walking
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Sacred place · Medieval
Derry, Ballyphilip
County Down
Derry’s two shale-built church ruins preserve early Christian worship, layered buildings and a cemetery whose men, women and children complicate a…
- Near Downpatrick
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