Sacred place · Medieval
Saint Macdara's Island
County Galway
A patron saint of seafarers whose shrine, still reached only by open boat, has drawn a pilgrimage every 16 July for generations - a crossing so exp…
- Near Carna
- Rough ground
The directory
Explore every place
Page 38 of 47 in the full directory.
Browsing 100 places — search and the map cover the whole directory.
-
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Salcombe Castle
Devon
Salcombe Castle is a tide-accessible coastal gun battery whose Civil War siege and ruined towers preserve a dramatic defensive landmark on the Sout…
- Rough ground
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Salisbury Friary
Wiltshire
A royal-backed Dominican house that vanished so completely that only chance building work in 1978 proved where its dead once lay.
- Easy path
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Salisbury Grey Friary
Wiltshire
A Franciscan house built with timber from Henry III himself, erased so completely by the Dissolution (Henry VIII's closure of the monasteries in th…
-
Ancient place · Medieval
Saltwells Local Nature Reserve
West Midlands
Beneath the bluebells and gorse of a Black Country nature reserve lie the buried workings of medieval coal miners and a spring once bottled as a cu…
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Saltwood Castle
Kent
A private home whose gatehouse still shelters descendants of the family that owned it since the 1950s, on a site where four knights are presumed to…
- Near Saltwood
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Sandal Castle
West Yorkshire
A ruined castle above the Calder, begun in timber by the Warennes and rebuilt in stone, and the setting of a scene in Shakespeare.
- Some walking
-
Sacred place · Pictish & early medieval
Sandbach Crosses
Cheshire
Sandbach’s paired ninth-century Anglo-Saxon crosses are an extraordinary public survival: carved with biblical scenes and interlace, dispersed afte…
- Near Chester
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Sandgate Castle
Kent
Two surviving Tudor ledger books, 350 pages long, record its construction in such detail that a historian has called them the most complete buildin…
- Near Sandgate
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Sandleford Priory (monastery)
Berkshire
One of its priors, William Westbury, went on to save Eton College from being folded into St George's Chapel, Windsor: an unlikely brush with histor…
- Near Newbury
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Sandown Castle, Kent
Kent
A Parliamentarian prisoner died here in 1664 after months of what his wife called inhumane confinement in a fort already being described as ruinous…
- Near Deal
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Sandsfoot Castle
Dorset
Sandsfoot Castle is a major Henry VIII coastal artillery fort whose Civil War service, cliff erosion and recent stabilisation illustrate both Tudor…
- Easy path
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Sandwell Priory
West Midlands
Suppressed in 1525 at Cardinal Wolsey's request to help fund his new Oxford college, more than a decade before Henry VIII's own dissolution: his cl…
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Sanquhar Castle
Dumfries and Galloway
Sanquhar Castle is a thirteenth-century Nith Valley stronghold whose Crichton ownership, ruinous decline and incomplete nineteenth-century restorat…
-
Tomb or burial place · Pictish & early medieval
Sarre Anglo-Saxon cemetery
Kent
Described after its 1863 excavation as arguably the richest Anglo-Saxon burial ground yet discovered, it was later found to be far larger than the…
- Near Sarre
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Sauvey Castle
Leicestershire
A royal hunting lodge whose builders flooded the valley to surround it with an artificial lake: earthworks Historic England says have few parallels…
- Near Leicester
- Some walking
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Sawley Abbey
Lancashire
One of only three surviving books from its library became the Sawley Map, the earliest English world map in the same tradition as the Hereford Mapp…
- Near Lancaster
- Easy path
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Sawtry Abbey
Cambridgeshire
Cambridgeshire's only Cistercian house, and the last resting place of a Scottish earl whose family tied the abbey, a monastery headed by an abbot,…
- Near Sawtry
- Rough ground
-
Building or ruin · Medieval
Saxtead Green Windmill
Suffolk
Raised three times during its working life, and rebuilt entirely between 1957 and 1960 using a crowntree salvaged from a demolished mill at Wetheri…
- Near Saxtead Green
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Scaleby Castle
Cumbria
A working private home built inside a genuine medieval war-castle: moated, twice besieged and burned in the Civil War, yet still lived in today.
- Near Carlisle
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Scalloway Castle
Shetland Islands
Built by unpaid workers summoned from the parishes of Shetland, for an earl who was executed for misrule eight years after it was finished.
-
Tomb or burial place · Prehistoric
Scar boat burial
Orkney Islands
A Viking boat burial on Sanday, dating from between 875 and 950.
- Near Sanday
- Some walking
-
Fortified place · Prehistoric
Scarborough Castle
North Yorkshire
A single headland was fortified and refortified for over two thousand years running, from an early defended settlement to a Second World War listen…
- Some walking
-
Fortified place · Iron Age
Scholes Coppice
South Yorkshire
A double bank and ditch enclose a wooded hilltop above Rotherham with no obvious way in: an Iron Age (the centuries before Rome arrived, from about…
- Some walking
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Scoles Manor
Dorset
Scoles Manor combines a thirteenth-century medieval structure with a 1635 farmhouse and a long, documented chain of Dorset families, making it an u…
- Near Corfe Castle
- Easy path
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Scone Palace / Scone Abbey
Perth and Kinross
The crowning place of forty-two Kings of Scots and the site of Scotland's first parliament: now a Gothic Revival house with nothing left standing o…
- Near Perth
-
Fortified place · Roman
Scot's Dyke
North Yorkshire
Each stretch of bank and ditch differs enough in height and width to show separate work-gangs dug it, not one planned scheme.
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Scotstarvit Tower
Fife
Scotstarvit Tower is a remarkably intact six-storey Fife tower house, recording the transition from an Inglis family residence to Sir John Scot’s l…
- Near St Andrews
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Scraesdon Fort
Cornwall
Scraesdon Fort is a Grade II listed Palmerston fort built to defend Plymouth's naval base, preserving the scale and strategic anxieties of nineteen…
- Rough ground
-
Fortified place · Iron Age
Scratchbury Camp
Wiltshire
A defended settlement on high ground, raised around 100 BC, encloses a smaller, far older bank-and-ditch enclosure that three separate excavation t…
- Some walking
-
Fortified place · Iron Age
Scutchamer Knob
Oxfordshire
A round barrow: a prehistoric burial mound of earth: whose name records a king's killing, a shire's assembly point, and a Viking army's superstitio…
- Some walking
-
Fortified place · Roman
Seabegs Wood
Falkirk
Seabegs Wood preserves a fortlet on the Antonine Wall, with excavated rampart (a defensive bank of earth or stone) foundations and a position betwe…
- Some walking
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Seagate Castle
North Ayrshire
Seagate’s scheduled ruin preserves Irvine’s former harbour route and the sixteenth-century Montgomerie town house, where defence, aristocratic disp…
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Seaton Priory
Cumbria
A nunnery so poor it depended on grants from an archbishop, a duke and a neighbouring abbey just to survive: yet its ruined chancel (the eastern en…
- Near Workington
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Sedgwick Castle
West Sussex
A double concentric moat in a former deer park, 140 metres across at the outer ring, whose stone went into the foundations of a house in 1600.
- Some walking
-
Building or ruin · Roman
Segontium
Gwynedd
Segontium was the main Roman fort of north Wales, a thousand-man auxiliary base above the Menai Strait whose settlement, Mithraic temple and later…
- Near Caernarfon
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Iron Age
Segsbury Camp
Oxfordshire
A Victorian excavation into the rampart turned up a shield boss and urn fragments beside human bone: a burial that may have been slipped into the e…
- Near Letcombe Regis
- Rough ground
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Selborne Priory
Hampshire
Nothing of its buildings shows above ground today, yet twentieth-century digging recovered one of the most complete documentary archives of any Eng…
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Selby Abbey
North Yorkshire
A fifteenth-century window in the quire carries the heraldic arms of George Washington's ancestors: reputedly among the oldest depictions of the Am…
- Easy path
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Sele Priory
West Sussex
A Benedictine priory: a religious house led by a prior, a rank below an abbot: dependent on Saumur, cut loose from France in 1396 for an annual pay…
- Easy path
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Selsey Abbey
West Sussex
Founded by St Wilfrid in 681 on land from the king of the last mainland English kingdom to be converted, and marked by the freeing of 250 slaves.
- Easy path
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Selskar Abbey
County Wexford
Ireland's first Anglo-Irish peace treaty was signed on this ground in 1169: decades before the stone priory, a monastery headed by a prior and usua…
- Near Wexford
- Easy path
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Sempringham Priory
Lincolnshire
The mother house of the only religious order ever founded by an Englishman, governing dozens of double communities of monks and nuns until its ston…
- Some walking
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Seton Collegiate Church
East Lothian
Seton Collegiate Church is an unusually legible unfinished late-medieval church, preserving its choir, transepts and tower alongside the absent nav…
- Near Dunbar
-
Tomb or burial place · Prehistoric
Seven Barrows
Berkshire
A cemetery of Bronze Age (roughly 2500–800 BC, when metal tools first spread) burial mounds also shelters one of Berkshire's richest surviving frag…
- Near Upper Lambourn
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Severndroog Castle
Greater London
Severndroog Castle is a striking 18th-century memorial folly that links Britain’s imperial naval history with the surveys that helped create the Or…
- Near Shooter’s Hill
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Shaftesbury Abbey
Dorset
Shaftesbury Abbey was one of medieval England’s richest nunneries, shaped by royal foundation and the cult of St Edward the Martyr before its 1539…
- Easy path
-
Ancient place · Roman
Shaftoe Crags Settlement
Northumberland
Shaftoe Crags preserves Iron Age, the period before Roman rule, enclosures and later Romano-British: a period when local people lived under Roman r…
- Rough ground
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Shalford Preceptory
Berkshire
A Knights Hospitaller estate reduced to a single building: its medieval chapel, which quietly served as a farm barn for centuries before its histor…
- Near Brimpton
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Sham Castle
Somerset
A folly on Claverton Down above Bath, its screen wall pierced by a pointed arch between turrets and towers.
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Shanbally Castle
County Tipperary
Shanbally was the grandest private house the English architect John Nash ever built in Ireland: and within 150 years the state itself dynamited it…
- Near Cahir
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Shane's Castle
County Antrim
Shane’s Castle layers medieval O’Neill power, John Nash’s unrealised rebuilding, destructive fires, and a later tourist railway on the shores of Lo…
- Near Randalstown
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Shap Abbey
Cumbria
One of its own abbots rose to become Bishop of Ely, and his memory still links this remote Cumbrian ruin to the great cathedral where his monument…
- Near Shap
- Some walking
-
Sacred place · Prehistoric
Shap Stone Avenue
Cumbria
Antiquarians once ranked this Cumbrian avenue with Avebury as one of Europe's largest stone monuments: now a scatter of boulders and a circle half-…
- Near Shap
- Some walking
-
Settlement · Prehistoric
Shearplace Hill Enclosure
Dorset
Shearplace Hill Enclosure is a scheduled Bronze Age (the period from about 2500 to 800 BC) farmstead where excavated round houses, trackways and do…
- Near Cerne Abbas
- Some walking
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Sheen Priory
Greater London
Sheen Priory was Henry V’s ambitious Carthusian foundation beside his rebuilt royal palace, a lost monastery whose foundations survive beneath Rich…
- Near Richmond
- Some walking
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Sheffield Castle
South Yorkshire
Buried beneath a demolished 20th-century market, its foundations still trace the medieval castle where Mary, Queen of Scots spent fourteen years a…
-
Crossing or structure · Medieval
Sheffield Lock
Berkshire
An early-18th-century canal lock still doing its original job, its scalloped brick chamber and paddle gearing protected as a scheduled monument (le…
- Easy path
-
Building or ruin · Medieval
Sheffield Manor Lodge
South Yorkshire
For nearly fifteen years this lodge and its neighbouring castle held Mary, Queen of Scots captive, making it one of the best-documented settings fo…
-
Sacred place · Prehistoric
Sheldon stone circle
Aberdeenshire
Long classified as a recumbent stone circle despite no recumbent stone ever being found here, Sheldon has recently had that identity questioned by…
- Near Oldmeldrum
- Some walking
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Shelford Priory
Nottinghamshire
Shelford brings contested patronage, royal visits and a later transformation into a fortified manor to one site that began as a small Augustinian c…
-
Ancient place · Medieval
Shepherd Wheel
South Yorkshire
One of the last complete water-powered grinding workshops on the River Porter, still turning where dozens once ground Sheffield's blades.
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Sherborne Abbey
Dorset
Sherborne Abbey is a thousand-year religious landmark that evolved from Saxon cathedral to Benedictine abbey and parish church, preserving exceptio…
- Near Sherborne
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Sherborne Castle
Dorset
Sherborne Castle combines Sir Walter Raleigh’s Tudor lodge, the ruins of a powerful twelfth-century bishop’s palace and a major eighteenth-century…
- Near Sherborne
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Sheriff Hutton Castle
North Yorkshire
For a century and a half this was the seat of the Council of the North, and briefly a residence of Richard III himself, before its stone was carted…
- Easy path
-
Building or ruin · Medieval
Shiaba
Argyll and Bute
A cleared crofting township on the Ross of Mull whose stone walls, kilns and mill remains survive well enough to trace the whole shift from run rig…
- Near Bunessan
- Rough ground
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Shingay Preceptory
Cambridgeshire
A water-filled moat in open Cambridgeshire farmland is almost all that survives of a Hospitaller estate nearly nine centuries old, its buildings go…
- Near Shingay
-
Settlement · Iron Age
Shipton Hill Settlement
Dorset
Shipton Hill Settlement is a rare small Iron Age (roughly 800 BC until the Roman conquest) defended community, whose natural slopes, banks and dome…
- Near Shipton Gorge
- Some walking
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Shirburn Castle
Oxfordshire
A supposed visit by Dante's tutor, quoted in Victorian sources, turned out to be a forgery in a book published in 1948.
- Near Shirburn
- Easy path
-
Sacred place
Shoreham Memorial Cross
Kent
Shoreham Memorial Cross is a near-unique chalk hillside war memorial created by a bereaved local father and village community in 1920, transforming…
- Near Shoreham
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Shotwick Castle
Cheshire
A Norman river-crossing castle whose flooded ditches defended the Dee ford before the fort became a royal hunting lodge and then earthworks.
- Near Chester
- Rough ground
-
Building or ruin · Medieval
Shotwick Hall
Cheshire
A 1662 brick manor whose Grade II* house, garden and nearby moat preserve the shift from a fortified home to a post-medieval (after about 1500) est…
- Near Chester
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Shrewsbury Abbey
Shropshire
Shrewsbury Abbey turned a Norman foundation into a major pilgrimage centre around St Winifred, then survived dissolution (Henry VIII's closure of t…
- Easy path
-
Tomb or burial place · Prehistoric
Shrewsbury Barrow
Greater London
Shrewsbury Barrow is the sole survivor of a cluster of Bronze Age (roughly 2500–800 BC, when metal tools first spread) burial mounds once visible o…
- Near Winchester
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Shrewsbury Castle
Shropshire
Shrewsbury Castle began as William I’s Welsh-border command and became a civic, military and museum landmark; excavated ditches, high-status feasti…
- Easy path
-
Tomb or burial place · Prehistoric
Shrub's Wood Long Barrow
Kent
English Heritage counts it among the finest surviving oval barrows in south-east England, yet as of 2007 no archaeologist had ever formally excavat…
- Near Chilham
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Shrule Abbey
County Mayo
A grassy mound carries thirteen centuries of memory: a saint's disciple, two changes of overlord, a 1306 tax record: with almost nothing built left…
- Near Claremorris
- Rough ground
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Shrule Castle
County Mayo
A river-crossing stronghold on the Mayo–Galway border whose 1570 siege killed a gallowglass chief and left the man who took it wounded in the face.
- Near Claremorris
- Rough ground
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Shulbrede Priory
West Sussex
A medieval monastic house that became the home of the Ponsonby family, and is listed Grade I.
- Easy path
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Sibton Abbey
Suffolk
A monastery under an abbot of the early Cistercian order, founded about 1150 by William de Chesney, High Sheriff of Norfolk and Suffolk.
- Near Sibton
- Rough ground
-
Fortified place · Iron Age
Sidbury Castle
Devon
Sidbury Castle is a substantial Iron Age hillfort: an Iron Age settlement defended by banks and ditches on high ground: whose large summit setting…
- Some walking
-
Fortified place · Iron Age
Sidbury Hill
Wiltshire
A far older settlement was found sealed beneath the bank in the 1950s. Access is difficult: the ground carries tank tracks and occasional artillery…
- Some walking
.jpg?width=800)
_(geograph_5829222).jpg?width=800)
More places
Briefer entries: recorded and worth knowing, with fuller pages to come.
-
Fortified place · Iron Age
Sancreed Beacon
Cornwall
Sancreed Beacon is a Bronze Age (roughly 2500–800 BC, when metalworking spread) hilltop landscape in Penwith where cists, burial mounds and a hut s…
- Near Sancreed
- Some walking
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Sandown Castle, Isle of Wight
Isle of Wight
Sandown Castle was Henry VIII’s short-lived Device Fort, a hybrid coastal artillery design whose construction was interrupted by French attack and…
- Near Sandown
- Some walking
-
Building or ruin · Roman
Sarn Helen
Conwy County Borough
Sarn Helen is not a single monument but a name attached to several stretches of Roman road threading through Wales, the principal route running som…
- Near Conwy
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Saul Monastery
County Down
Saul Monastery brings Saint Patrick tradition, Viking and medieval disruption, and a surviving Augustinian abbey (a self-governing monastery, its h…
- Near Downpatrick
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Sclerder Abbey
Cornwall
Sclerder Abbey is a Grade II listed nineteenth-century former Carmelite monastery whose successive religious communities and current ecumenical lif…
- Near Penzance
- Easy path
-
Sacred place · Prehistoric
Scorhill
Devon
Scorhill is one of Devon’s largest and best-preserved Bronze Age (roughly 2500–800 BC, when metalworking spread) stone circles, where damaged but u…
- Rough ground
-
Sacred place · Prehistoric
Seahenge
Norfolk
Seahenge is a uniquely preserved early Bronze Age (roughly 2500–800 BC, when metal tools first spread) timber circle, built in 2049 BC, whose ritua…
- Near Holme-next-the-Sea
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Sean Ross Abbey
County Tipperary
A Georgian country house whose grounds hold a ruined medieval abbey, an unmarked burial ground for over a thousand children, and the real story beh…
- Near Roscrea
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Iron Age
Seaton Down
Devon
Seaton Down is an unusual Iron Age promontory fort: a headland cut off by a bank to make a defensible enclosure: whose long linear barrier demonstr…
- Near Seaton
- Some walking
-
Building or ruin · Roman
Segedunum
Tyne and Wear
Five places in the Roman empire were called Segedunum. Nobody agrees what the name means.
- Near Wallsend
- Easy path
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Sewardsley Priory
Northamptonshire
Sewardsley Priory links a twelfth-century Cistercian nunnery to the 2006 archaeological rediscovery that restored its lost location and plan to pub…
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Shankill Castle
County Kilkenny
Shankill Castle joins a Butler tower-house core to Georgian and Victorian landscape design, now animated by a living artist's home, gardens and an…
- Near Paulstown
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Shanmuckinish Castle
County Clare
Shanmuckinish Castle preserves the near-full height of a fifteenth-century Irish tower house, its collapsed wall exposing vaulted rooms, passages a…
- Near Ballyvaughan
- Rough ground
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Shobdon Priory
Herefordshire
A 12th-century church at a Herefordshire priory: a monastic house under a prior rather than an abbot: whose entire fabric was pulled down in the 17…
- Near Shobdon
- Easy path
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Shouldham Priory
Norfolk
Shouldham Priory was a rare Gilbertine double house for canons and nuns, founded around 1190 and now preserved as buried remains, earthworks and fi…
- Near Shouldham
-
Fortified place · Iron Age
Shoulsbury castle
Devon
Shoulsbury Castle is Exmoor’s largest and best-known hillfort: a defended hilltop settlement: with an unusual rectangular plan that has prompted de…
- Some walking
-
Sacred place · Prehistoric
Shovel Down
Devon
Shovel Down is a concentrated Dartmoor prehistoric (predating the written record in Britain) landscape, combining probable Bronze Age (roughly 2500…
- Rough ground
-
Tomb or burial place · Prehistoric
Showery Tor
Cornwall
Showery Tor is a distinctive Bodmin Moor outcrop wrapped in a large artificial cairn (a mound of piled stones, often covering a burial), preserving…
- Rough ground
No places match those filters.
Kinds of place
Ages