Sacred place · Medieval
Priory of St Thomas of Canterbury
West Midlands
Its vanished graveyard kept resurfacing under Birmingham's streets for two centuries, fuelling a debate over whether this, not St Martin's, was the…
- Near Birmingham
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Page 36 of 47 in the full directory.
Browsing 100 places — search and the map cover the whole directory.
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Sacred place · Medieval
Priory of St. Thomas near Stafford
Staffordshire
The richest Augustinian priory in England, whose monks were caught hunting with the laity in 1347: and were caught again in 1518 and 1524.
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Prittlewell Priory
Essex
Prittlewell Priory is a rare surviving Cluniac house in Essex, whose medieval doorway and later museum preserve a monastic site transformed into So…
- Easy path
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Tomb or burial place · Prehistoric
Proleek Dolmen
County Louth
A single capstone weighing some 40 tonnes has balanced on two portal stones for roughly five thousand years, making it one of the heaviest dolmen c…
- Near Dundalk
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Medieval
Prudhoe Castle
Northumberland
Prudhoe records a castle sharpened by failure: William the Lion’s two unsuccessful attacks prompted upgrades from timber palisade to stone keep and…
- Some walking
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Carved stone · Medieval
Puleston Cross
Shropshire
Puleston Cross is a medieval memorial and market monument whose relocation, disputed identity and archaeological surroundings preserve Newport’s ch…
- Easy path
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Fortified place · Medieval
Pulford Castle
Cheshire
A grassy mound beside a border stream once carried enough weight that a Wirral manor owed its lord the duty of mending its wooden defences.
- Near Chester
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Sacred place · Medieval
Pulloxhill Grange
Bedfordshire
Its scant surviving records trace a working monastic economy: rents, land and jurisdiction shared between Woburn Abbey and Dunstable Priory: cut sh…
- Near Pulloxhill
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Tomb or burial place · Prehistoric
Punds Water
Shetland Islands
Above the peat near Mangaster, in Northmavine on Shetland's Mainland, a low mound of large boulders rises about 1.5 metres from the surrounding gro…
- Easy path
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Ancient place · Medieval
Pwll Du Tunnel
Monmouthshire
Six thousand feet of tunnel, worked by horses: the longest horse-powered tramway tunnel built in Britain, and originally just a mine.
- Near Blaenavon
- Rough ground
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Sacred place · Prehistoric
Q and R Holes
Wiltshire
The earliest known stone structure at Stonehenge, predating the visible Sarsen Circle by centuries and giving the first clear evidence of the monum…
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Quakers Friars
Bristol
A single Bristol plot carries two founding stories at once: a medieval Dominican friary (a house of friars, who worked among townspeople rather tha…
- Near Bristol
- Easy path
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Tomb or burial place · Prehistoric
Quanterness chambered cairn
Orkney Islands
A burial monument on Mainland into which a roundhouse was built about 700 BC, and which held the remains of 157 people.
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Iron Age
Quarley Hill
Hampshire
One ridge, three settlements: a farming landscape dating roughly 2500–800 BC, a later fort raised over an older palisade, then a Roman coda of coin…
- Some walking
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Sacred place · Medieval
Quarr Abbey (Cistercian)
Isle of Wight
Quarr Abbey combines the remains of a powerful medieval Cistercian house with a bold 20th-century Benedictine monastery, making its landscape a rar…
- Near Ryde
- Easy path
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Building or ruin · Roman
Queen's House
Greater London
Queen’s House is England’s first consciously classical building, designed by Inigo Jones for Stuart queens and central to the river vista at Greenw…
- Easy path
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Fortified place · Medieval
Queenborough Castle
Kent
Queenborough Castle was England’s first concentric castle and the only new royal castle of the Late Middle Ages, though it now survives only as ear…
- Near Queenborough
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Building or ruin · Roman
Queenhithe
City of London
A silted tidal inlet in the middle of the City of London is the last surviving dock on the whole modern waterfront, its walls now doing duty as flo…
- Near London
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Quenington Preceptory
Gloucestershire
A minor Gloucestershire manor became, within decades of its 1193 founding, a Hospitaller estate that absorbed a fellow preceptory (a local estate o…
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Quin Abbey
County Clare
A friary: a house of friars, who worked among townspeople rather than withdrawing from them: built inside the wall of the Norman castle that replac…
- Near Quin
- Easy path
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Fortified place
Quintin Castle
County Down
Quintin Castle’s story is one of repeated rescue: inheritance, nineteenth-century restoration, modern refurbishment, and adaptation as a private ev…
- Near Portaferry
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Ancient place · Prehistoric
Quoygrew settlement, Westray
Orkney Islands
A medieval Norse settlement on Westray, begun as a small farmstead between about 900 and 1000.
- Near Westray
- Easy path
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Fortified place · Medieval
Raby Castle
County Durham
Nine towers ring a courtyard that has passed between only two families in seven centuries: a fortress that became, and remains, a lived-in family s…
- Near Staindrop
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Building or ruin · Medieval
Racton Monument
West Sussex
A four-storey brick folly of 1766–75, built either as a summerhouse or so an earl could watch his ships dock at Emsworth, and derelict since.
- Rough ground
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Fortified place · Medieval
Radcliffe Tower
Greater Manchester
Radcliffe Tower is the sole survival of a fortified 1403 manor house, a rare Grade I listed and scheduled remnant of local lordship in Greater Manc…
- Near Radcliffe
- Easy path
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Fortified place · Roman
Raedykes
Aberdeenshire
A computer model of its roughly 93-acre rampart (an encircling bank built for defence) suggests room for three legions -- some 16,000 men -- making…
- Near Stonehaven
- Some walking
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Building or ruin · Medieval
RAF Upper Heyford
Oxfordshire
A Cold War frontline base whose F-111s flew the 1986 Libya raid and Gulf War combat missions is now being rebuilt, house by house, into a town of 6…
- Near Upper Heyford
- Easy path
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Fortified place · Medieval
Raglan Castle
Monmouthshire
Its hexagonal Great Tower once housed a steam-powered fountain that reputedly scared off a hostile search party: a castle built to dazzle as much a…
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Medieval
Rahinnane Castle
County Kerry
More than half the outer walls of Rahinnane Castle still stand, a rectangular three-storey tower house set within the earthworks of a far older rin…
- Near Caherdaniel
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Fortified place · Iron Age
Rainsborough Camp
Northamptonshire
Rainsborough Camp preserves an Iron Age: the centuries before Rome arrived: hillfort, a hilltop enclosure ringed by earth ramparts, whose defences…
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Medieval
Rampton Castle
Cambridgeshire
An unfinished siege-work whose builders simply walked away when their enemy died elsewhere: a rare frozen moment from the chaos of the civil war kn…
- Near Rampton
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Sacred place · Medieval
Ramsey Abbey
Cambridgeshire
A fen-island hermitage founded on the strength of a bull's wanderings grew into the third-ranked abbey (a monastic house under the rule of an abbot…
- Near Ramsey
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Ranton Abbey
Staffordshire
An Augustinian priory whose tower still stands beside the burnt-out shell of a hunting lodge: two ruins from two different centuries on one site.
- Easy path
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Fortified place · Medieval
Raphoe Castle
County Donegal
Built from the dismantled stones of an older round tower, the bishop's residence survived two sieges and a rebellion before an accidental fire fini…
- Near Raphoe
- Easy path
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Fortified place · Medieval
Rappa Castle
County Mayo
Three centuries of Bourke, Crofton and Knox ownership, and a run of High Sheriffs of Mayo, ended when the Gillespie family simply built a new house…
- Near Claremorris
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Fortified place · Medieval
Rathcoffey Castle
County Kildare
Rathcoffey’s surviving gatehouse is the last trace of a Wogan manor transformed by a family feud, Tudor forfeiture, Civil War siege and Georgian re…
- Near Rathcoffey
- Rough ground
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Fortified place · Prehistoric
Rathdown Castle
County Wicklow
Excavation traces continuous use of this ravine-side site from the Neolithic to a Norman stronghold burned in 1301: one place spanning six thousand…
- Near Wicklow
- Rough ground
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Sacred place · Medieval
Rathfran Friary
County Mayo
A Dominican priory once known as "Brandubh's Fort of the Sweet Bells": and the scene of a 1513 murder that shattered the sanctuary its walls were m…
- Near Ballina
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Medieval
Rathmacknee Castle
County Wexford
One of County Wexford's best-preserved tower houses, its five-sided walled bawn and defensive features survive intact from a family who held their…
- Near Wexford
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Medieval
Rathumney Castle
County Wexford
A rare surviving Cistercian grange house rather than a true castle, built by the family who first held these lands and still owned by descendants w…
- Near Wexford
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Medieval
Rattin Castle
County Westmeath
A 16th-century tower house forfeited amid the upheaval of 1641, its stone walls still standing close to where the M6 motorway now cuts through the…
- Near Kinnegad
- Some walking
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Building or ruin · Roman
Ravenglass Roman Bath House
Cumbria
Its walls still stand nearly four metres high above the Cumbrian coast: one of the tallest surviving Roman structures in northern Britain, saved by…
- Near Ravenglass
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Ravenstone Priory
Buckinghamshire
Its 1524 suppression by Thomas Wolsey helped bankroll a new Oxford college: this small Buckinghamshire priory, a monastery headed by a prior rather…
- Near Ravenstone
- Some walking
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Sacred place · Medieval
Ravenstonedale Priory
Cumbria
A Gilbertine cell meant for only a master and three canons, whose surviving vault once served the manorial court as a prison for those facing capit…
- Near Kirkby Stephen
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Prehistoric
Ravenswood standing stone
City of Edinburgh
The Ravenswood standing stone is a Bronze Age (roughly 2500–800 BC) monument whose repeated moves and survival within an Edinburgh housing estate m…
- Near Edinburgh
- Easy path
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Fortified place · Medieval
Ravensworth Castle (North Yorkshire)
North Yorkshire
Ravensworth Castle’s moated fourteenth-century ruins, designed park and reused stone make an unusually legible record of aristocratic estate-making…
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Medieval
Ravensworth Castle, Lamesley
Tyne and Wear
The family mined coal directly under their own house from about 1935 and demolished it at the same time. The wreckage was meant to build a model vi…
- Near Lamesley
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Building or ruin · Roman
Raw Dykes
Leicestershire
Raw Dykes is a scheduled Leicester earthwork (a bank, ditch or mound shaped from soil rather than built in stone), most likely a Roman aqueduct, wh…
- Near Leicester
- Easy path
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Fortified place · Medieval
Rayleigh Castle
Essex
Rayleigh Castle is Essex’s only castle named in Domesday Book, preserving a large Norman motte-and-bailey (an early Norman form, a timber tower rai…
- Some walking
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Sacred place · Medieval
Reading Abbey
Berkshire
Once one of the largest royal monasteries in Europe and the burial place of a king, reduced by the Dissolution (Henry VIII's closure of the monaste…
- Easy path
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Tomb or burial place · Pictish & early medieval
Reask
County Kerry
At the centre of a walled compound a kilometre east of Baile an Fheirtéaraigh, a single cross-inscribed standing stone rises from the grass, surrou…
- Near Dingle
- Easy path
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Fortified place · Medieval
Red Castle, Shropshire
shropshire
Sandstone walls on a natural crag, ruinous by the time Leland saw them around 1540, and later the centrepiece of a landscape garden built around a…
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Fortified place · Medieval
Redwood Castle
County Tipperary
For three centuries this tower house was less a garrison than a working law school: seat of the Mac Aodhagáin, hereditary Brehon judges whose rulin…
- Near Newport
- Easy path
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Building or ruin
Reform Tower, Derbyshire
Derbyshire
Reform Tower is a compact gritstone monument that turns the 1832 Reform Act into a permanent political landmark on Stanton Moor, its blocked doorwa…
- Some walking
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Building or ruin · Roman
Regulbium
Kent
One low headland carried a Roman signal station, a Saxon Shore fort, and a royal Anglo-Saxon monastery whose abbot rose to become Archbishop of Can…
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Medieval
Reigate Castle
Surrey
The castle itself vanished centuries ago, yet its rock-cut cave below the site is said to be where the barons drafted the terms that became Magna C…
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Reigate Priory
Surrey
An Augustinian priory turned Tudor mansion turned secondary school: its 13th-century cloister (the covered walkway round a monastery's central cour…
- Near Reigate
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Prehistoric
Rempstone Stone Circle
Dorset
Rempstone Stone Circle is Dorset’s only sandstone circle, a damaged and overgrown Bronze Age (roughly 2500–800 BC, when metalworking spread) monume…
- Near Corfe Castle
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Medieval
Renhold Castle
Bedfordshire
A timber motte-and-bailey: an early Norman castle of a timber tower on an earth mound, with a walled yard beside it: once guarded the Great Ouse va…
- Near Renhold
- Some walking
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Tomb or burial place · Prehistoric
Rennibister Earth House
Orkney Islands
An underground structure on Mainland, probably for storage, found in 1926 when a threshing machine broke through it.
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Medieval
Repentance Tower
Dumfries and Galloway
Repentance Tower is a rare mid-sixteenth-century Border watchtower, built for warning rather than living and still marked by its enigmatic ‘REPENTA…
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Sacred place · Medieval
Repton Abbey
Derbyshire
A stone crypt built over a spring still stands beneath a parish church, holding the remains of Mercian kings and later giving up a mass grave of Vi…
- Near Bakewell
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Sacred place · Medieval
Repton Priory
Derbyshire
Gilbert Thacker’s 1550s demolition left Repton Priory almost flat within a day, ending a four-century Augustinian house beside the River Trent.
- Near Bakewell
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Fortified place · Medieval
Restormel Castle
Cornwall
Restormel Castle is England’s most intact circular shell keep, transformed from a Norman fort into a luxurious administrative palace of the Earls o…
- Near Lostwithiel
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Revesby Abbey
Lincolnshire
A Cistercian house founded by an earl who ended his life as one of its monks later passed to the botanist Sir Joseph Banks, and its Victorian succe…
- Near Revesby
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Sacred place · Medieval
Rewley Abbey
Oxfordshire
Oxford's Cistercian house of study, built so monks could attend university lectures: a monastic experiment in higher education now reduced to a sin…
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Sacred place · Roman
Rey Cross
County Durham
Rey Cross is a protected Stainmore landmark whose uncertain purpose: legendary Viking grave or boundary marker: was tested but not resolved by mode…
- Near Bishop Auckland
- Easy path
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Fortified place · Medieval
Rhayader Castle
Powys
Built, destroyed, rebuilt, destroyed, rebuilt and destroyed again between 1177 and 1231, and then abandoned. Only the rock-cut ditch is visible.
- Rough ground
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Fortified place · Medieval
Rhuddlan Castle
Denbighshire
A castle built with a unique diamond-shaped layout, its gatehouses set at the corners rather than the sides, and reached by a river deliberately re…
- Near Denbigh
- Easy path
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Carved stone · Medieval
Riasg Buidhe Cross
Argyll and Bute
Its carver rendered Christ with spiral arms and a fishtail body, an image found nowhere else among Scotland's early medieval (roughly AD 400–1100,…
- Near Scalasaig
- Easy path
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Fortified place · Medieval
Riber Castle
Derbyshire
A Victorian industrialist's folly, hauled block by block up a 200-metre hill by pulley: later a school, a wartime food store, and a wildlife park,…
- Near Bakewell
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Building or ruin · Roman
Richborough Castle
Kent
The place where Roman Britain both began and ended: Claudius's invasion beachhead of AD 43 and, four centuries later, one of the last Roman foothol…
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Fortified place · Medieval
Richmond Castle
North Yorkshire
Richmond Castle preserves an early Norman power centre above the Swale, later reshaped by military use and the First World War’s Richmond Sixteen.
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Medieval
Richmont Castle
Somerset
A castle King Stephen took by luring its garrison out and burning the gates behind them.
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Sacred place · Medieval
Rievaulx Abbey
North Yorkshire
Rievaulx Abbey shows how Cistercian prayer, engineered water, and European wool and iron trade remade a remote Yorkshire valley into a monastic pow…
- Some walking
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Tomb or burial place · Prehistoric
Rillaton Barrow
Cornwall
Rillaton Barrow produced the celebrated Rillaton Gold Cup, a rare Bronze Age (the period from about 2500 to 800 BC) grave object now displayed at t…
- Near Liskeard
- Rough ground
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Sacred place · Medieval
Rincrew Abbey
County Waterford
A ruined house of two crusading military orders in succession: Templar, then Hospitaller: standing on private land where no visitor can walk its st…
- Near Waterford
- Rough ground
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Tomb or burial place · Prehistoric
Ringlemere barrow
Kent
A metal-detected gold cup led to the discovery that this ploughed-out mound sits atop Kent's largest known assemblage of Neolithic (the late Stone…
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Crossing or structure · Medieval
Ringley Old Bridge
Greater Manchester
Ringley Old Bridge is a protected 1677 stone crossing of the River Irwell, built after flood destroyed its wooden predecessor and still linking Rin…
- Near Kearsley
- Easy path
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Settlement · Iron Age
Ringmoor
Dorset
Ringmoor is a well-preserved Iron Age (from around 800 BC up to the Roman conquest) and Romano-British (Britain under Roman rule, AD 43–410) farmin…
- Near Okeford Fitzpaine
- Some walking
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More places
Briefer entries: recorded and worth knowing, with fuller pages to come.
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Sacred place · Medieval
Priory of the Holy Trinity, Ipswich
Suffolk
The townspeople used it as their parish church until 1300, when the canons built St Margaret's next door to get them out.
- Near Ipswich
- Easy path
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Fortified place
Purbeck Mineral and Mining Museum
Dorset
The Purbeck Mineral and Mining Museum keeps the Isle of Purbeck’s ball-clay industry legible through rebuilt mine structures, locomotives and the h…
- Near Norden
- Easy path
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Fortified place · Medieval
Purt Castle
County Limerick
A tower house destroyed in the very rebellion that ended Geraldine rule in Munster, its ruin marking a hinge point in west Limerick's history.
- Near Newcastle West
- Rough ground
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Building or ruin · Roman
Pye Road
Suffolk
It ran from the Iceni capital at Venta Icenorum to the legionary base at Camulodunum: the A140 still follows part of it.
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Fortified place · Medieval
Quoile Castle
County Down
Quoile Castle is a protected riverbank tower house that illustrates the dense network of small fortified residences around Strangford Lough.
- Near Downpatrick
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Fortified place · Iron Age
Raddon Top
Devon
Raddon Top preserves evidence for Neolithic (the late Stone Age, roughly 4000–2500 BC in Britain), Early Iron Age and later Iron Age use on the hig…
- Near Cheriton Fitzpaine
- Some walking
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Sacred place · Medieval
RAF Bentley Priory
Greater London
RAF Bentley Priory was the command centre of Fighter Command during the Battle of Britain, where Dowding’s air-defence system coordinated the prote…
- Near Stanmore
- Easy path
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Fortified place · Medieval
Rahan Castle
County Donegal
Rahan Castle records the changing fortunes of Clan Suibhne in Donegal, from a fifteenth-century stronghold through plantation-era transfers and pro…
- Rough ground
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Fortified place · Iron Age
Rame Head
Cornwall
Rame Head is an Iron Age (the centuries before Rome arrived, from about 800 BC) promontory fort (a coastal spur defended by banks thrown across its…
- Near Penzance
- Some walking
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Tomb or burial place · Prehistoric
Rathcoran
County Wicklow
A Bronze Age hillfort, a defended hilltop settlement built when metal tools first spread between roughly 2500 and 800 BC, was built directly around…
- Near Wicklow
- Easy path
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Fortified place · Medieval
Rathfriland Castle
County Down
Rathfriland Castle is a reduced Magennis stronghold whose single surviving wall preserves a seventeenth-century story of rebellion and deliberate d…
- Near Rathfriland
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Fortified place · Medieval
Rathlin Castle
County Antrim
Rathlin’s lost island castle sheltered Robert Bruce after defeat in 1306, then became the target of the 1575 assault whose killing of garrison and…
- Near Rathlin Island
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Sacred place · Medieval
Reading Nunnery
Berkshire
A Berkshire nunnery founded in 979, in the last century of Anglo-Saxon rule, whose only surviving trace is the parish church built on its former gr…
- Near Reading
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Sacred place · Medieval
Red Abbey, Cork
County Cork
Red Abbey’s stone tower is one of the few standing fragments of medieval Cork, surviving the Augustinian precinct’s destruction and later serving a…
- Near Cork
- Easy path
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Fortified place · Medieval
Red Bay Castle
County Antrim
Red Bay Castle is a coastal Antrim stronghold shaped by Bissett and MacDonnell power, repeated destruction, and the wider contest for the Glens.
- Near Cushendall
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Sacred place · Medieval
Reenconnell
County Kerry
On a hill rising 274 metres above the north-western Dingle Peninsula, some 5.7 kilometres north-north-west of Dingle town, stand the weathered rema…
- Near Dingle
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Fortified place · Medieval
Rheban Castle
County Kildare
Rheban’s roofless stone castle bears witness to a river frontier where Norman lords, Gaelic families and Confederate armies repeatedly contested au…
- Near Athy
- Rough ground
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Fortified place · Medieval
Rhyd-y-gors Castle
Carmarthenshire
A bluff above the River Towy, about a mile south of Carmarthen, marks where an ancient ford once crossed and where Rhyd-y-gors Castle briefly stood…
- Near Llandeilo
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Sacred place · Medieval
Rialton Grange
Cornwall
Rialton Grange records the former agricultural estate of the priors of Bodmin in St Columb Minor, a small surviving clue to medieval monastic landh…
- Near St Columb Minor
- Easy path
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