Building or ruin · Prehistoric
Silbury Hill
Wiltshire
At 39.3 metres it is the tallest prehistoric mound in Europe, built with a labour investment: some 18 million man-hours: that rivals an Egyptian py…
- Some walking
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Page 39 of 47 in the full directory.
Browsing 100 places — search and the map cover the whole directory.
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Sacred place · Medieval
Silverstream Priory
county-meath
A house built for the Gormanston family in 1843, passed through two religious orders, and in 2017 made the first new monastery in County Meath sinc…
- Near Drogheda
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Building or ruin · Medieval
Sinai Park House
Staffordshire
Its name comes from the Old French for blood. Monks came here to convalesce after being bled.
- Easy path
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Building or ruin · Roman
Six Hills
Hertfordshire
The largest surviving group of Roman burial mounds in England, standing where local legend blames the Devil for their creation.
- Near St Albans
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Fortified place · Medieval
Sizergh
Cumbria
One family held this house for over seven centuries, and its Elizabethan panelling was sold abroad, missed, and finally brought home in 1999.
- Near Carlisle
- Easy path
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Fortified place · Medieval
Skelton Castle
North Yorkshire
Skelton Castle shows how a medieval stronghold was demolished yet partially absorbed into a Gothic country house and changing estate identity.
- Easy path
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Fortified place · Medieval
Skenfrith Castle
Monmouthshire
A circular keep rises from the middle of a squared curtain wall beside the Monnow: one-third of a deliberately linked trio of castles that governed…
- Easy path
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Crossing or structure · Medieval
Skerton Bridge
Lancashire
The first large public bridge in England built with a flat roadway rather than a bowed one, a design John Rennie later carried into Waterloo Bridge…
- Near Lancaster
- Easy path
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Fortified place · Medieval
Skipness Castle
Argyll and Bute
A working stronghold refortified across three centuries, ending its working life not by decay but under active siege in 1646: the last Scottish cas…
- Near Skipness
- Easy path
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Fortified place · Medieval
Skipsea Castle
East Riding of Yorkshire
The Normans built their motte (the great earth mound at the heart of an early castle) on a mound already a millennium and a half old, and dammed a…
- Near Beverley
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Fortified place · Medieval
Skipton Castle
North Yorkshire
One of the few English castles never taken by force in nearly a thousand years, it endured a three-year Civil War siege and still stands roofed and…
- Some walking
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Building or ruin · Prehistoric
Skirrid Fawr
Monmouthshire
A hill reputedly split by the Crucifixion drew Catholics to secret Mass at its ruined summit chapel for two centuries when that worship was outlawed.
- Near Abergavenny
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Fortified place · Iron Age
Skitten Broch
Highland
A broch excavated twice within four decades of Highland archaeology before being levelled entirely for a wartime runway: its erasure is now the cle…
- Near Killimster
- Easy path
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Fortified place · Medieval
Slade Castle
County Wexford
A four-storey tower house guards Bannow Bay and Waterford Harbour from a tiny 210-acre estate, its scale paid for by fishing or trade rather than l…
- Near Wexford
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Medieval
Slane Castle
County Meath
A late-Georgian rebuild of a confiscated Fleming estate that became, from 1981, the natural amphitheatre behind some of rock music's biggest outdoo…
- Near Slane
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Iron Age
Slapton Castle
Devon
Slapton Castle is an Iron Age promontory fort: a coastal spur defended by banks across its neck: whose low but strategic position overlooks Slapton…
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Iron Age
Slate Hill Settlement
Northumberland
Four concentric ramparts curve round the north and west of the enclosure; quarrying has taken the east side down to one.
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Fortified place · Medieval
Sleady Castle
County Waterford
One family's grave in Lismore cathedral, a castle their descendant built eighty years later, and a great-granddaughter of the tenants who once serv…
- Near Dungarvan
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Medieval
Sleaford Castle
Lincolnshire
A bishop's fortified manor rather than a warrior's stronghold, it hosted two kings and a Tudor state council before all but vanishing beneath its o…
- Near Sleaford
- Some walking
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Sacred place · Medieval
Sleaty Church
County Laois
A seventh-century bishop here wrote one of the earliest surviving lives of Saint Patrick, at a site that also once served as a residence of the Kin…
- Near Portlaoise
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Sligo Abbey
County Sligo
A 15th-century tower hangs suspended over the nave on two arches alone: bolder than any of its sister Munster friaries, and now unreachable even by…
- Near Sligo
- Easy path
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Fortified place · Iron Age
Slwch Tump
Powys
A defended hilltop close to Brecon, also known as Slwch Camp.
- Near Brecon
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Iron Age
Small Down Knoll
Somerset
Fourteen round barrows run in a single line along the crest of the hill, ringed by the banks and ditches of an enclosure raised in the Bronze Age,…
- Some walking
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Settlement · Roman
Smedmore Hill Settlement
Dorset
Smedmore Hill preserves a rare, well-preserved Romano-British (Britain under Roman rule, AD 43–410) farming settlement, where terraced small enclos…
- Near Corfe Castle
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Medieval
Smerby Castle
Argyll and Bute
Two separate bonds, in 1594 and 1597, show the family here signing not as MacDonald but as M'Connall: a rare direct trace of how Gaelic Kintyre act…
- Near Campbeltown
- Rough ground
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Building or ruin · Medieval
Smithills Hall
Greater Manchester
Smithills Hall preserves one of north-west England’s oldest manor houses, where a medieval Radcliffe residence evolved through gentry, industrial a…
- Easy path
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Fortified place · Iron Age
Smythapark
Devon
Smythapark is an Iron Age promontory hillfort: a defended hilltop settlement of the Iron Age: near Bratton Fleming, part of a Devon landscape notab…
- Near Bratton Fleming
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Iron Age
Snabrough broch
Shetland Islands
Snabrough Broch sits on a short, low promontory on the shore of Snabrough Loch, on the island of Unst in Shetland, its ruined wall now measuring ar…
- Some walking
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Ancient place · Roman
Snailbeach new smeltmill
Shropshire
Reputedly the greatest volume of lead per acre in Europe: and a smeltmill of national importance now being destroyed by vegetation.
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Fortified place · Medieval
Snape Castle
North Yorkshire
A mob from the Pilgrimage of Grace once held Katherine Parr and her stepchildren hostage inside its walls, years before she became queen of England.
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Snelshall Priory
Buckinghamshire
A monastery that never found its feet: refounded twice, dogged by poverty, and quietly dismantled so its stones could build the parish church next…
- Near Tattenhoe
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Fortified place · Medieval
Snodhill Castle
Herefordshire
Recent digs found a stone hall keep buried inside the visible tower, pushing its origin back to 1067 and making it one of England's earliest stone…
- Near Peterchurch
- Some walking
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Sacred place · Medieval
Soham Abbey
Cambridgeshire
A Cambridgeshire parish church stands on the foundations of the county's first Roman Christian site, whose founder's bones travelled through three…
- Near Soham
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Fortified place · Iron Age
Solsbury Hill
Somerset
A flat-topped hill above Batheaston, with the remains of an ancient defended settlement.
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Medieval
Someries Castle
Bedfordshire
A fortified manor rather than a true castle, its surviving gatehouse ranks among the earliest brick buildings raised in England.
- Easy path
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Fortified place · Medieval
Somerton Castle
Lincolnshire
A king of France spent roughly a year confined here after Poitiers, inside a fortress whose 1330s artillery towers were a design a generation ahead…
- Near Somerton
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Sacred place · Medieval
Sopwell Priory
Hertfordshire
A community of Benedictine women vanished into a Tudor courtyard: the same walls sheltered a medieval prioress and, four centuries later, a command…
- Near St Albans
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Fortified place · Medieval
Sorbie Tower
Dumfries and Galloway
Sorbie Tower is the ancestral stronghold of Clan Hannay, a late-sixteenth-century fortified house whose surviving lower levels preserve a rare Gall…
- Near Sorbie
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Fortified place · Medieval
South Cerney Castle
Gloucestershire
A castle so easily confused with two others of the same era that historians still dispute whether it, or a neighbouring site, saw King Stephen's fo…
- Easy path
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Fortified place · Medieval
South Cowton Castle
North Yorkshire
A country gentleman built this house like a fortress, its twin corner towers a plain answer to the violence of the Wars of the Roses.
- Easy path
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Building or ruin · Prehistoric
South Lodge Camp
Wiltshire
A century after Pitt Rivers first dug here, re-excavation overturned his own conclusions: hollows he took for natural features turned out to be Bro…
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Medieval
South Moreton Castle
Oxfordshire
Two separate earthworks half a mile apart preserve both a Norman lord's stronghold and a disputed siege-castle from the 12th-century Anarchy.
- Near South Moreton
- Some walking
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Tomb or burial place · Prehistoric
South Street barrow
Wiltshire
Excavation here found no burial at all, making this Wiltshire mound one of England's clearest Neolithic (the first farming period in Britain, rough…
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Fortified place · Iron Age
South Weald Camp
Essex
South Weald Camp is a rare east-of-England late Iron Age hillfort: a defended hilltop settlement from the centuries before Rome arrived: whose alte…
- Easy path
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Fortified place · Medieval
Southampton Castle
Hampshire
One of the first castles in England fitted with cannon, and once the storehouse of the royal wine trade through Southampton's medieval docks.
- Near Southampton
- Easy path
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Fortified place · Medieval
Southsea Castle
Hampshire
One of Henry VIII's Device forts, stormed in the Civil War, rebuilt by Charles II's Dutch engineer, and still training its guns on the Solent as la…
- Some walking
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Sacred place · Medieval
Southwark Cathedral
Greater London
The first Gothic church in London, nearly demolished for a railway in 1852: and with a nave, the long western body of the church, that has been reb…
- Near Southwark
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Sacred place · Medieval
Southwick Priory
Hampshire
A pilgrimage shrine famous enough to draw Henry VIII in person in 1510, its original church still stands in daily use inside the Roman walls of Por…
- Near Winchester
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Medieval
Sowerby Castle, Cumbria
Cumbria
Its walls have vanished, but its name has not: Castle Sowerby parish still carries the memory of a timber stronghold once passed between the Englis…
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Tomb or burial place · Prehistoric
Sperris Quoit
Cornwall
Sperris Quoit is a scheduled, ruined Penwith burial chamber whose missing capstone and surviving cremation evidence record both prehistoric (before…
- Rough ground
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Sacred place · Medieval
Spinney Abbey
Cambridgeshire
A murdered prior, a Cromwell in retirement and a working farm making award-winning cider all sit on the same low fen-edge site where an Augustinian…
- Near Wicken
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Tomb or burial place · Prehistoric
Spinsters' Rock
Devon
Spinsters’ Rock is a striking Neolithic (the first farming period in Britain, roughly 4000–2500 BC) dolmen near Drewsteignton, whose restored grani…
- Near Drewsteignton
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Medieval
Spitbank Fort
Hampshire
A Victorian island gun-fort built to catch any warship that slipped past its two larger neighbours in the Solent: now a scheduled monument (legally…
- Near Portsmouth
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Fortified place · Medieval
Spofforth Castle
North Yorkshire
A hall-tower cut straight into the rock it stands on, wrecked in the Civil War, its ruins now owned outright by the village that saved the field ar…
- Easy path
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Building or ruin · Roman
Spoonley Wood Roman Villa
Gloucestershire
Long cited as the textbook case of a Roman villa evolving from a simple corridor house into a full courtyard estate, though the dating evidence beh…
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Medieval
Springfield Castle
County Limerick
A Norman foothold that became a Gaelic-Norman lordship, sheltered a 17th-century poet, burned in 1921, and is still lived in by the family that fir…
- Near Limerick
- Easy path
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Fortified place · Medieval
Spynie Palace
Moray
For roughly five hundred years this was the working seat of the Bishops of Moray, and its tower still stands as the largest medieval tower house in…
- Near Elgin
- Some walking
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Sacred place · Medieval
St Albans Cathedral
Hertfordshire
Its crossing tower, raised from reclaimed Roman brick around 1080, is the only 11th-century great tower still standing in England.
- Near St Albans
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Sacred place · Medieval
St Aldhelm's Well
Somerset
An ancient spring at Doulting that is the source of the River Sheppey, listed Grade II.
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
St Andrew's and Blackfriars' Hall, Norwich
Norfolk
St Andrew’s and Blackfriars’ Hall form England’s most complete surviving mendicant complex from before the sixteenth-century closure of the monaste…
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Fortified place · Medieval
St Andrew's Castle, Hamble
Hampshire
Raised in barely a year against an invasion that never came, its guns went on to watch the Solent for a century before the sea itself demolished mo…
- Near Winchester
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Sacred place · Medieval
St Andrew's Church, Dacre
Cumbria
A monastery recorded here in the 8th and 10th centuries left two carved cross-shaft fragments inside the Norman church that replaced it, one bearin…
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Pictish & early medieval
St Andrew's Church, Penrith
Cumbria
Two Anglo-Saxon cross-shaft monuments in the churchyard, the Giant's Grave and the Giant's Thumb, predate the present Georgian church by eight cent…
- Near Carlisle
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
St Andrew's Priory, Northampton
Northamptonshire
A Cluniac priory, a monastery run by a prior, where the philosopher Duns Scotus was ordained a priest in 1291, and whose stone was later reused to…
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Fortified place · Medieval
St Andrews Castle
Fife
St Andrews Castle was the palace and prison of Scotland’s bishops, a frontline fortress in the Wars of Independence and Reformation (the sixteenth-…
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Sacred place · Roman
St Ann's Well (Buxton)
Derbyshire
A warm spring the Romans venerated with 232 votive coins still flows at a steady 27°C beneath the Georgian spa town built around it.
- Near Bakewell
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
St Anthony's Chapel and Hermitage
City of Edinburgh
The chapel above St Margaret's Loch is one of Edinburgh's least explained medieval buildings: no foundation record survives, and the earliest firm…
- Near Edinburgh
- Some walking
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Sacred place · Medieval
St Augustine's Abbey
Kent
St Augustine’s Abbey (a monastic house under the rule of an abbot) was a foundational English Benedictine monastery, created beside Canterbury’s fi…
- Easy path
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Building or ruin · Medieval
St Augustine's Conduit House
Kent
St Augustine’s Conduit House preserves the medieval water infrastructure that supplied a major Canterbury abbey (a religious community led by an ab…
- Near Canterbury
- Some walking
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Sacred place · Medieval
St Bartholomew-the-Great
City of London
Founded on the strength of a single fevered dream, its Norman crossing and choir survived the Dissolution, the Great Fire and the Blitz to become L…
- Near London
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Prehistoric
St Bartholomew's Church, Barrow
Cheshire
A Cheshire parish church rooted in a Knights Hospitaller preceptory, where medieval stonework, Georgian additions and Victorian restoration meet in…
- Near Great Barrow
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
St Bartholomew's Church, Penn
West Midlands
A round Anglo-Saxon churchyard and a broken preaching cross tied to Lady Godiva's husband sit beside a Victorian rebuild by the Lancaster firm of P…
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
St Bees Priory
Cumbria
A 14th-century knight's body, found in 1981 with skin and nails still intact after six centuries, lies within a priory, a monastery headed by a pri…
- Near Carlisle
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
St Benet's Abbey
Norfolk
St Benet’s Abbey (a monastery headed by an abbot) is an exceptional Broads monastery: a Benedictine house spared at the Dissolution (Henry VIII's c…
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Sacred place · Medieval
St Beuno's Church, Clynnog Fawr
Gwynedd
St Beuno’s Church is a Grade I medieval pilgrimage church at the site of a 7th-century clas, notable for its late-medieval fabric, chapel and nearb…
- Near Clynnog Fawr
- Easy path
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Building or ruin · Medieval
St Blane's Church
Argyll and Bute
Its identity was forged not by an ancient founding but by two centuries of Scottish church schism and reunion, condensed into a single Dunblane bui…
- Near Dunblane
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Building or ruin · Pictish & early medieval
St Botolph's Church, Ruxley
Greater London
St Botolph’s Church, Ruxley is a rare intact medieval church ruin that survived 400 years as a farm building, preserving its form within a modern g…
- Near Winchester
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Sacred place · Medieval
St Botolph's Priory
Essex
St Botolph’s Priory: a monastery headed by a prior: was England’s first Augustinian house and a leading convent until 1536; its Norman ruins preser…
- Easy path
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Building or ruin · Medieval
St Brendan's Chapel, Skipness
Argyll and Bute
A roofless chapel far larger than any other in Kintyre, standing beside five carved late medieval tombstones in a graveyard still used today.
- Near Skipness
- Easy path
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Fortified place · Medieval
St Briavels Castle
Gloucestershire
Its gatehouse carries three full sets of working portcullises, a defensive feature no comparable English castle actually completed, guarding a stro…
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Medieval
St Catherine's Castle
Cornwall
St Catherine's Castle is a compact Henrician gun fort at Fowey that shows four centuries of coastal defence, from Henry VIII's invasion fears to Se…
- Some walking
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Sacred place · Medieval
St Catherine's Chapel, Lydiate
Merseyside
St Catherine’s Chapel is a rare late-medieval private chapel, locally called Lydiate Abbey despite never being an abbey, with fabric and burials th…
- Near Lydiate
- Easy path
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Fortified place · Iron Age
St Catherine's Hill, Hampshire
Hampshire
A single chalk hilltop carries an Iron Age (roughly 800 BC until the Roman conquest) hillfort, a lost medieval chapel, a 17th-century turf maze, an…
- Near Winchester
- Some walking
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Sacred place · Medieval
St Chad's Church, Wybunbury
Cheshire
The surviving leaning tower of a repeatedly rebuilt Cheshire church, whose nineteenth-century rescue technique later informed work on the Leaning T…
- Near Wybunbury
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Sacred place · Medieval
St Christopher's Church, Pott Shrigley
Cheshire
Its churchyard preaching cross is a scheduled monument (a site protected by law for its archaeological importance) in its own right, and one of its…
- Near Pott Shrigley
- Easy path
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Tomb or burial place · Prehistoric
St Clement's Church, Rodel
Outer Hebrides
Three generations of MacLeod chiefs are buried in the walls of this building, in tombs they had prepared for themselves while alive. The church at…
- Near Rodel
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
St Columba's Chapel, Southend
Argyll and Bute
A ruined medieval chapel on the Kintyre coast whose carved grave slabs are the strongest surviving evidence of the community that once worshipped h…
- Near Southend
- Some walking
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Sacred place · Medieval
St Cuthbert's Well
Northumberland
Cuddy’s Well preserves a spring tied to Cuthbert’s cult and twelfth-century miracle stories, still channelled through a Georgian conduit for baptis…
- 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
Sidmouth Priory
Devon
Sidmouth Priory’s surviving chapel fabric and changing monastic affiliations trace a small coastal religious site from Norman patronage through dis…
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Building or ruin · Medieval
Silkstone glassworks
south-yorkshire
Abigail Pilmey, wife of the founder, was one of the signatories who successfully petitioned Parliament against the Glass Tax in 1696.
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Sacred place · Medieval
Skendleby Priory
Lincolnshire
Skendleby Priory preserves the archaeology of a small Bardney Abbey cell, where 2005 excavation brought the believed St James Chapel remains into v…
- Near Skendleby
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Fortified place · Medieval
Sketrick Castle
County Down
Sketrick Castle preserves a rare island tower house with a boat bay, spring passage, and a history of medieval capture and storm damage.
- Near Killinchy
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Fortified place · Medieval
Skryne Castle
County Meath
Its Irish name outlives its walls: Caisleán Scrín Cholm Cille records a shrine to Colmcille on this hill long before Adam de Feypo raised his motte…
- Near Tara
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Sacred place · Medieval
Slevesholm Priory
Norfolk
Slevesholm Priory was a Cluniac cell of Castle Acre at Methwold, a completely lost monastic site whose absence above ground records the long impact…
- Near Methwold
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Sacred place · Medieval
Snape Priory
Suffolk
Wolsey obtained a papal bull to suppress it in 1527–28. After his fall the site went to the Duke of Norfolk instead.
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Sacred place · Medieval
South Abbey, Youghal
County Cork
South Abbey was one of Ireland’s earliest Franciscan foundations; although its medieval fabric has gone, its site preserves a continuous local reli…
- Near Youghal
- Easy path
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Tomb or burial place · Pictish & early medieval
Spong Hill
Norfolk
Spong Hill is the largest known Early Anglo-Saxon cremation cemetery, containing 2,259 cremations and 57 inhumations that reveal a regional burial…
- Near North Elmham
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Sacred place · Medieval
St Adamnan's Church, Lonan
Isle of Man
St Adamnan’s Church at Lonan preserves a remote Manx Christian site with 5th-century Celtic crosses, a likely early keeill and surviving medieval p…
- Near Baldrine
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Carved stone · Prehistoric
St Breock Downs Monolith
Cornwall
St Breock Downs Monolith is Cornwall's largest prehistoric menhir: a standing stone from before any written account of Britain existed: a re-erecte…
- Some walking
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