Fortified place · Medieval
Orchardton Tower
Dumfries and Galloway
Orchardton is Scotland’s only cylindrical tower house, a deliberate fifteenth-century revival of an obsolete form within a later, more domestic tow…
- Some walking
The directory
Explore every place
Page 34 of 47 in the full directory.
Browsing 100 places — search and the map cover the whole directory.
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Building or ruin · Medieval
Ore Place
East Sussex
A manor house whose owners ranged from a traditionally claimed Plantagenet founder to Jesuit theologians who trained Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, be…
- Near Hastings
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Fortified place · Medieval
Orford Castle
Suffolk
A round keep of a design unmatched in England, raised by Henry II to check the power of the Bigods.
- Near Orford
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Medieval
Ormacleit Castle
Outer Hebrides
A T-plan, two-storey mansion house on South Uist, Ormacleit Castle stood as the seat of Clanranald for barely a decade before fire reduced it to th…
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Fortified place · Medieval
Ormonde Castle
County Tipperary
A fortified bawn on the River Suir grew a Tudor manor house grafted onto its medieval towers: the first Elizabethan-style residence built in Irelan…
- Near Carrick-on-Suir
- Easy path
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Building or ruin · Medieval
Oronsay Priory
Argyll and Bute
A tidal island monastery so remote that its own priors barely surface in the record, yet it left one of the finest carved crosses in the Hebrides s…
- Near Oronsay
- Rough ground
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Sacred place · Prehistoric
Orphir Round Church
Orkney Islands
Orphir Round Church preserves the remains of a circular medieval church dedicated to Saint Nicholas.
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Osney Abbey
Oxfordshire
For four centuries the wealthiest monastery in Oxford, its bell Great Tom now the loudest voice in the city's skyline: hung not in its own ruined t…
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Sacred place · Medieval
Ossington Preceptory
Nottinghamshire
Ossington was a Hospitaller estate centre whose disputed village grant reveals how medieval military-religious orders accumulated and defended Engl…
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Fortified place · Medieval
Oswestry Castle
Shropshire
Oswestry Castle preserves a Welsh-Marcher stronghold whose name, ownership and repeated attacks track the border’s shifting politics, while its mot…
- Near Oswestry
- Easy path
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Crossing or structure · Medieval
Otley Bridge
West Yorkshire
A bridge commissioned by the Archbishop of York in 1228 and finished the next year, its width set to take a cart, and flooded repeatedly ever since.
- Easy path
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Fortified place · Medieval
Otterburn Tower
Northumberland
Otterburn layers an 1830 country-house rebuild over a medieval tower, beside a frontier river and burial circles from before written records reache…
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Our Lady's Well, Hempsted
Gloucestershire
A 14th-century well house carved with Saint Anne, the Virgin Mary and an angel: physical record of a pilgrimage for cures revived as recently as 1989.
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Fortified place · Iron Age
Ousdale Broch
Highland
One of the best-preserved brochs on the Caithness coast, with its entrance passage still roofed by its original stone lintels after more than two t…
- Easy path
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Crossing or structure · Medieval
Over Bridge
Gloucestershire
Telford borrowed the arch's shape from a Parisian bridge over the Seine, and builders watched it sink eight measured inches as its foundations sett…
- Easy path
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Building or ruin · Roman
Over Burrow Roman Fort
Lancashire
A Roman fort so thoroughly buried beneath a country house that its very name is guesswork, pieced together from a scholarly quarrel over the Antoni…
- Near Lancaster
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Sacred place · Medieval
Owston Abbey
Leicestershire
One of Leicestershire's poorest Augustinian houses, its chancel (the eastern end of the church, holding the altar) survives folded into the parish…
- Near Owston
- Easy path
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Fortified place · Medieval
Owston Ferry Castle
Lincolnshire
Owston Ferry Castle preserves the motte (the earthen mound a castle was raised on) of a repeatedly dismantled Norman stronghold, rebuilt in 1173 fo…
- Near Owston Ferry
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Medieval
Oxford Castle
Oxfordshire
A large, partly ruined medieval castle on the western side of central Oxford, its timber work rebuilt in stone.
- Near Oxford
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Fortified place · Medieval
Oxford city walls
Oxfordshire
A rare English example of genuine concentric double-walling, possibly inspired by Crusader experience of Near Eastern fortresses or by masons retur…
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Fortified place · Medieval
Oxwich Castle
Swansea
A castle in name only. What stands is a grand Tudor fortified manor house, and building its east range may have bankrupted the man who raised it.
- Near Oxwich
- Easy path
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Fortified place · Medieval
Oystermouth Castle
Swansea
Burnt by the Welsh in 1116, probably destroyed again in 1137, and lost with its owners' line in 1215: rebuilt each time.
- Near Mumbles
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Iron Age
Padderbury Top
Cornwall
Padderbury Top is a compact Cornish defended settlement whose surviving rampart, a defensive bank of earth or stone, and aerial traces preserve a l…
- Near Penzance
- Some walking
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Sacred place · Medieval
Padley Chapel
Derbyshire
A gatehouse range rebuilt as a chapel in 1933 to honour two priests hanged, drawn and quartered for their faith in 1588.
- Near Bakewell
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Building or ruin · Medieval
Padley Hall
Derbyshire
Padley Hall’s double courtyard preserves the setting where two hidden priests were seized in July 1588 and later became known as the Padley Martyrs.
- Near Bakewell
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Building or ruin · Roman
Pagans Hill Roman temple
Somerset
Three temples built one after another on the same spot, in a double-octagonal plan: on a hill whose apt-sounding name turns out to be modern.
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Fortified place · Medieval
Painscastle Castle
Powys
A castle besieged by two Welsh armies and taken by neither, held for a time by a woman, and rebuilt in stone by a king to fight Llywelyn the Great.
- Rough ground
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Sacred place · Medieval
Paisley Abbey
Renfrewshire
Robert II was born here by caesarean section in 1316, after his mother fell from her horse nearby. A stone marker stands where she came off.
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Fortified place · Medieval
Pallas Castle
County Galway
Its bawn: the perimeter wall with four corner towers and a working gatehouse: survives almost complete, letting the whole defensive layout of a Bur…
- Near Tynagh
- Easy path
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Tomb or burial place · Prehistoric
Pant-y-Saer Burial Chamber
Isle of Anglesey
Pant-y-Saer is a partially collapsed Neolithic (the late Stone Age, about 4000–2500 BC in Britain) chamber tomb where excavation revealed repeated…
- Near Benllech
- Rough ground
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Carved stone · Pictish & early medieval
Papil Stone
Shetland Islands
Carved on a single face of stone left otherwise plain, the Papil Stone rises to a large, long-stemmed cross shaped like a fan, its shaft crowded be…
- Easy path
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Building or ruin · Medieval
Papplewick Pumping Station
Nottinghamshire
Papplewick preserves a working Victorian clean-water system whose original beam engines still demonstrate the engineering that transformed Nottingh…
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Tomb or burial place · Prehistoric
Parc Cwm long cairn
Swansea
In 1869 workmen digging for road stone on the Gower Peninsula broke into a mound of limestone rubble and found it packed with broken human bone. Wh…
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Fortified place · Iron Age
Parciau hill fort
Isle of Anglesey
Parciau is a cliff-edged Anglesey hillfort: a defended hilltop settlement: where a dense settlement of hut circles and late Roman finds suggest ren…
- Near Llaneugrad
- Rough ground
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Building or ruin · Medieval
Park Crescent West ice well
Greater London
The Park Crescent West ice well is a rare, well-preserved 1780 urban ice store whose use by ice-trade pioneer William Leftwich captures the shift f…
- Near Marylebone
- Easy path
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Fortified place · Medieval
Parke's Castle
County Leitrim
A Gaelic tower house, a Plantation manor and a wartime prison all stand on the same patch of lakeshore: one site holding three centuries of conques…
- Near Manorhamilton
- Easy path
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Building or ruin · Medieval
Paston Great Barn
Norfolk
Paston Great Barn is a 1581 Paston grain store whose exceptional architecture now supports Britain’s only building-based barbastelle maternity roos…
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Sacred place · Medieval
Patrixbourne Priory
Kent
Patrixbourne shows how a Kent parish church became an alien priory cell, first tied to Normandy and then transferred to Merton in 1409.
- Near Patrixbourne
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Building or ruin · Medieval
Patterson's Spade Mill
County Antrim
Patterson’s Spade Mill is the British Isles’ last water-powered spade mill operating in situ, preserving a critically endangered craft in Templepat…
- Near Belfast
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Fortified place · Medieval
Peddimore Hall
West Midlands
Photographed by the government in case bombing destroyed it, Peddimore Hall survived the Second World War intact: a moated manor whose earthworks p…
- Near Minworth
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Fortified place · Medieval
Pele Tower, Angle
Pembrokeshire
The only pele tower to survive anywhere in Wales, its rubble walls still carrying corbels for a vanished parapet walk and machicolations above a mo…
- Near Angle
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Fortified place · Medieval
Pembridge Castle
Herefordshire
A four-storey round tower keep behind a working moat once sheltered a hunted Catholic priest, later canonised as a martyr, ahead of his 1679 execut…
- Easy path
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Fortified place · Medieval
Pembroke Castle
Pembrokeshire
A medieval castle in the town centre, the original family seat of the Earldom of Pembroke.
- Near Pembroke
- Easy path
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Building or ruin · Medieval
Pen y Bryn
Gwynedd
The present roof timbers of Pen y Bryn were felled between 1619 and 1624, dated by dendrochronology to the refurbishment that gave the two-storey m…
- Near Bangor
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Fortified place · Medieval
Pen y Clawdd Castle
Monmouthshire
Pen y Clawdd is a scheduled double-moated mound whose archaeology complicates the simple label ‘castle’, preserving evidence of both a possible ear…
- Near Abergavenny
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Fortified place · Iron Age
Pen y Gaer
Conwy
A Conwy Valley hillfort: an Iron Age settlement defended by banks and ditches on high ground, the period from roughly 800 BC to the Roman conquest:…
- Near Conwy
- Some walking
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Building or ruin · Roman
Pen-toppen-ash
Newport
Pen-toppen-ash is a complex of late prehistoric: a period before written records reached Britain: enclosures on Kemeys Graig, whose possible Roman…
- Near Langstone
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Iron Age
Pen-y-crug
Powys
An Iron Age fort on a flat summit above Brecon, one of several strung along the Usk Valley, with a Victorian brickworks on its flank.
- Some walking
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Sacred place · Medieval
Penally Abbey
Pembrokeshire
An old rectory overlooking Carmarthen Bay, a mile and a half from Tenby, now a country house hotel.
- Near Penally
- Easy path
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Building or ruin · Medieval
Penarth Fawr
gwynedd
Two carved oak posts and the beam they carry make up the westernmost screen of their kind recorded in Wales, and the only one known in the old coun…
- Near Criccieth
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Fortified place · Medieval
Pencoed Castle
Newport
Pencoed Castle is an imposing but derelict Tudor mansion near Newport, where a thirteenth-century tower survives within the ambitious sixteenth-cen…
- Near Llanmartin
- Easy path
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Fortified place · Medieval
Pendennis Castle
Cornwall
Pendennis Castle is a major Henrician coastal fort whose layered batteries defended Carrick Roads from the sixteenth century to the Second World War.
- Near Penzance
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Medieval
Pendragon Castle
Cumbria
A Norman stronghold that took the name of a legendary king centuries after it was built, and was restored by a woman who kept it as one of her favo…
- Near Kirkby Stephen
- Rough ground
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Fortified place · Medieval
Pengersick Castle
Cornwall
Pengersick Castle is a rare surviving late-medieval Cornish tower house, enlarged into a fortified manor by families tied to local office and Saint…
- Near Penzance
- Easy path
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Fortified place · Medieval
Penhow Castle
Newport
Penhow Castle is a Grade II* early-twelfth-century fortified manor repeatedly remodelled over nine centuries, retaining an early tower and notably…
- Near Penhow
- Easy path
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Fortified place · Medieval
Penlle'r Castell
Swansea
A blockhouse at 1,213 feet, probably the 'New Castle of Gower' attacked and destroyed in 1252: sited to watch the ridge route and warn Swansea.
- Near Felindre
- Rough ground
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Fortified place · Medieval
Penllyn Castle
Vale of Glamorgan
Six courses of herringbone masonry near the base: an early Norman signature, and the argument for this being one of the first Norman buildings in G…
- Near Cowbridge
- Easy path
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Fortified place · Medieval
Pennard Castle
Swansea
The Braose family rebuilt the walls in stone at the turn of the fourteenth century. Sand dunes buried the site soon afterwards and it was abandoned.
- Near Pennard
- Some walking
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Building or ruin · Roman
Pennocrucium
Staffordshire
Named in a second-century Roman road-book, lost for centuries, and found again from the air in 1946.
- Easy path
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Fortified place · Roman
Pennymuir Roman camps
Scottish Borders
Camps A and B here are among the best-preserved Roman marching camps in Scotland, and Camp B was deliberately rebuilt inside Camp A rather than lai…
- Rough ground
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Sacred place · Prehistoric
Penrhos Feilw Standing Stones
Isle of Anglesey
Penrhos Feilw’s paired Bronze Age (the period from about 2500 to 800 BC) stones are an enigmatic coastal landmark on Holy Island, their deliberate…
- Near Holyhead
- Easy path
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Fortified place · Medieval
Penrhyn Castle
Gwynedd
Penrhyn Castle is Thomas Hopper’s monumental Neo-Norman country house, whose architecture, art and estate landscape are inseparable from wealth dra…
- Near Bangor
- Easy path
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Fortified place · Medieval
Penrice Castle
Swansea
A thirteenth-century castle of the de Penrice family, successor to a ringwork: an early castle defended by a circular bank and ditch rather than a…
- Near Penrice
- Easy path
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Fortified place · Medieval
Penrith Castle
Cumbria
Ownership passed from the Neville 'Kingmaker' line to a future king, then to a Dutch earl gifted the estate by a Dutch-born monarch, a chain of gra…
- Near Penrith
- Easy path
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Fortified place · Medieval
Penstowe Castle
Cornwall
Penstowe Castle is a scheduled Cornish early Norman castle with a timber tower on an earthen mound and a bailey, the walled yard beside it; its unu…
- Near Kilkhampton
- Some walking
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Sacred place · Medieval
Pentney Priory
Norfolk
Pentney Priory preserves a Grade I flint gatehouse from an Augustinian house founded around 1130, later merged with Wormegay and recycled into the…
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Fortified place · Iron Age
Pentre Camp
Powys
A third of a hectare defended by five concentric ramparts: and a spring at the foot of the slope that probably explains why.
- Rough ground
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Building or ruin · Prehistoric
Pentre Ifan
pembrokeshire
A sixteen-tonne capstone rests on the tips of three slender uprights, two and a half metres off the ground. One reading is that it was never meant…
- Near Pentre Ifan
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Fortified place · Medieval
Penwortham Castle
Lancashire
Penwortham Castle is a Scheduled Ancient Monument marking a post-Conquest motte (a steep artificial mound built to carry a timber tower) that guard…
- Near Penwortham
- Some walking
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Crossing or structure · Medieval
Penwortham Old Bridge
Lancashire
Penwortham Old Bridge is a protected 1759 Ribble crossing whose five unequal arches, cobbled roadway and surviving cutwater refuges record an early…
- Near Penwortham
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Penwortham Priory
Lancashire
A Norman motte, a lost Benedictine cell, and a demolished Victorian mansion all occupy the same modest hill above the Ribble: three buildings, one…
- Near Penwortham
- Easy path
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Fortified place · Iron Age
Penycloddiau
Flintshire
At 26 hectares its ramparts enclose one of the largest hillfort (a hilltop enclosure ringed by earth ramparts) interiors in Wales, and a 2017 dig p…
- Near Denbigh
- Rough ground
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Fortified place · Iron Age
Perborough Castle
Berkshire
Excavations found only a handful of storage pits inside its bank: evidence this was a lightly held fort, perhaps garrisoned only for a season at a…
- Near Hampstead Norreys
- Some walking
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Sacred place · Iron Age
Perran Round
Cornwall
Perran Round is Cornwall’s best-preserved plen-an-gwary, an earthwork arena: a mound or ditch formed by moving soil, not by building: with uncertai…
- Near Goonhavern
- Easy path
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Crossing or structure · Roman
Perry Bridge
West Midlands
A modest eighteenth-century packhorse bridge whose repair endowment quietly went on to found one of Birmingham's grammar schools.
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Pershore Abbey
Worcestershire
A Mercian minster refounded, despoiled, burned, rebuilt by a nobleman's patronage, then stripped again for Westminster Abbey: only a lantern tower…
- Easy path
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Building or ruin · Medieval
Perth-hir House
Monmouthshire
A moated Herbert mansion with two drawbridges, a centre of Catholic recusancy, pulled down piecemeal by its own owner and reduced to one wall.
- Near Rockfield
- Rough ground
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Tomb or burial place · Medieval
Perthi-Duon Burial Chamber
Isle of Anglesey
Perthi-Duon is an enigmatic collapsed Anglesey stone monument whose possible Neolithic (the closing Stone Age, roughly 4000–2500 BC) tomb status, e…
- Near Brynsiencyn
- Rough ground
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Fortified place · Medieval
Peterborough Castle
Cambridgeshire
Built by a Norman abbot to defend himself against his own monks, this earthwork (banks and ditches raised from the earth rather than quarried stone…
- Near Peterborough
- Some walking
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Sacred place · Medieval
Peterborough Cathedral
Cambridgeshire
One of only four surviving painted medieval wooden ceilings in Europe crowns a nave (the main body of a church, where the congregation gathers) who…
- Near Peterborough
- Easy path
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Building or ruin · Roman
Petriana
Cumbria
Buried beneath a Carlisle suburb, this was the largest fort on Hadrian's Wall, built to house Roman Britain's only thousand-strong cavalry regiment.
- Near Carlisle
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Tomb or burial place · Prehistoric
Pettigarths Field Cairns
Shetland Islands
On a low rise in the parish of Nesting in north-east Whalsay, two burial monuments stand roughly 140 metres north-west of the settlement mound at B…
- Easy path
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More places
Briefer entries: recorded and worth knowing, with fuller pages to come.
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Sacred place · Medieval
Orford Priory
Lincolnshire
Orford Priory was one of nine Premonstratensian canoness houses in historic Lincolnshire, preserving a rare record of female religious life from a…
- Near Stainton le Vale
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Sacred place · Medieval
Otham Abbey
East Sussex
Otham Abbey marks the short-lived first home of a Premonstratensian community later transferred to Bayham, while its chapel and later farmstead pre…
- Near Hastings
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Building or ruin · Roman
Othona
Essex
Othona was a late Roman Saxon Shore fort controlling the Blackwater and Colne estuaries, whose fabric was later reused in St Peter-on-the-Wall chapel.
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Otterton Priory
Devon
Otterton Priory preserves the trace of a Norman-linked Benedictine community whose parish-church tower and reused monastic fabric are the principal…
- Near Otterton
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Carved stone · Prehistoric
Oughtboy
County Tyrone
Oughtboy turns an Irish hill-name and scheduled stone alignments into a single landscape story, where language, terrain and protected archaeology r…
- Near Omagh
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Fortified place · Medieval
Oughtdoorish
County Tyrone
Oughtdoorish brings together a large Tyrone townland, a protected rath (a ringfort, a farmstead enclosed by a circular bank and ditch), and a name…
- Near Omagh
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Sacred place · Medieval
Painsthorpe Abbey
East Riding of Yorkshire
A community of Anglican Benedictine monks occupied a brick chapel grafted onto a Yorkshire country house for four years, before relocating in 1906…
- Near Beverley
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Sacred place · Medieval
Panfield Priory
Essex
Panfield Priory is a lost Augustinian alien house whose buried foundations preserve a rare Essex link to the Norman monastery of St Étienne at Caen.
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Fortified place · Medieval
Parkavonear Castle
County Kerry
The keep (the great tower at a castle's heart) at Parkavonear breaks with the standard Norman pattern before a visitor even reaches the door: inste…
- Near Cahersiveen
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Tomb or burial place · Prehistoric
Pawton Quoit
Cornwall
Pawton Quoit is an early Neolithic portal tomb: a tomb from from the era before writing arrived in these islands where uprights lift one huge roofi…
- Near Penzance
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Building or ruin · Roman
Peddars Way
Norfolk
Peddars Way is a 46-mile long-distance route following a Roman road or earlier trackway, linking the Icknield Way, Norfolk coast and National Trail…
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Medieval
Peel Castle
Isle of Man
Peel Castle layers a Norse 11th-century fortress over an older Celtic monastic island and the cathedral of Sodor and Man; its intact outer walls, e…
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Fortified place · Iron Age
Pen Dinas
Ceredigion
Cardigan Bay's pre-eminent hillfort: a defended hilltop settlement of the Iron Age, the centuries before Rome arrived from about 800 BC: formed by…
- Near Aberystwyth
- 900 metres from car park
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Iron Age
Peniel Heugh
Scottish Borders
A 237-metre hill near Ancrum carrying both an ancient defended settlement and the Waterloo Monument.
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Medieval
Penmaen Castle
swansea
Leslie Alcock's excavation found a timber gateway burnt down and rebuilt as a drystone gate tower: and suggested the rebuild was Welsh work on a No…
- Near Penmaen
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Fortified place · Medieval
Penn Castle
County Cork
Penn Castle retains a fifteenth-century Power-family tower within later rebuilding, linking a medieval defensive core to Admiral William Penn’s res…
- Near Ballydehob
- Easy path
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Fortified place · Iron Age
Peppercombe
Devon
Peppercombe combines a deep North Devon coastal valley, rare red Permian outlier geology and the poorly defined remains of an Iron Age hillfort: a…
- Rough ground
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Peterstone Priory
Norfolk
Peterstone Priory was an Augustinian house at Burnham Overy, founded before 1200 and incorporated in 1449, linking the village to Norfolk’s medieva…
- Near Burnham Overy
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