Building or ruin · Medieval
Bishop's Palace, Paignton
Devon
Paignton’s Bishop’s Palace preserves the bishops of Exeter’s medieval manorial centre, including walls, a fourteenth-century tower and chapel fragm…
- Easy path
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Page 7 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
Bishop's Waltham Palace
Hampshire
A Bishop of Winchester once hosted an emperor here to hammer out a European treaty, in a palace grand enough to entertain five English kings.
- Easy path
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Fortified place · Medieval
Bishopton Castle
County Durham
Its motte: the earthen mound a castle was raised on: was one of only twenty English mounds core-sampled and radiocarbon-dated by archaeologists che…
- Near Bishopton
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Fortified place · Medieval
Bitchfield Tower
Northumberland
Bitchfield Tower is a restored fifteenth-century pele tower whose attached manor and succession of owners chart five centuries of Northumberland es…
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Building or ruin · Medieval
Bixley medieval settlement
Norfolk
Bixley is one of East Anglia’s most extensive deserted medieval settlements, preserving earthworks that show how a small village near Norwich was o…
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Fortified place · Iron Age
Black Ball Camp
Somerset
A defended hilltop near Dunster, with a deep ditch and high bank still visible.
- Near Dunster
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Medieval
Black Castle, Bristol
Bristol
A pretend fortress built entirely from a factory's black waste slag, so convincingly castellated that a visiting Horace Walpole first mistook it fo…
- Near Bristol
- Easy path
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Fortified place · Iron Age
Black Castle, East Lothian
East Lothian
A double ring of earthen ramparts with two carefully placed causewayed entrances, sited between two other named hillforts in a dense East Lothian c…
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Roman
Black Ditches, Cavenham
Suffolk
Four and a half miles of undated dyke running across the Suffolk breckland, from the Lark to the Icknield Way.
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Fortified place · Iron Age
Black Head, Cornwall
Cornwall
Iron Age (the centuries before Rome arrived, from about 800 BC) ramparts above St Austell Bay share the headland with later military remains and a…
- Near Penzance
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Iron Age
Black Hill (South Lanarkshire)
South Lanarkshire
A hill valued as a viewpoint for four thousand years: with a cairn, a mound of piled stones often covering a burial, that may line up on Tinto to f…
- Some walking
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Sacred place · Medieval
Black Ladies Priory
Staffordshire
A house of Benedictine nuns founded in the mid twelfth century on the edge of Kiddemore Green.
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Iron Age
Black Meldon
Scottish Borders
A hillfort whose seven round houses survive as ring-grooves: and five of them stand in a deliberate straight line.
- Rough ground
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Fortified place · Iron Age
Blackbury Camp
Devon
Blackbury Camp is a well-preserved Middle Iron Age Devon hillfort, an Iron Age settlement defended by banks and ditches on high ground between roug…
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Iron Age
Blackcastle Hill, East Lothian
East Lothian
A single earthen bank, not the layered ramparts of its grander neighbours, rings this Lammermuir summit: a modest, univallate answer to the same Ir…
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Iron Age
Blackdown Rings
Devon
Blackdown Rings preserves an Iron Age hillfort, a hilltop enclosure ringed by earth ramparts from about 800 BC, commanding the River Avon valley in…
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Iron Age
Blacker's Hill
Somerset
A geophysical survey in 1999 found that the two circuits here were not built together: the fort began with one rampart, a defensive bank of earth o…
- Near Chilcompton
- Some walking
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Sacred place · Medieval
Blackfriars, Canterbury
Kent
Blackfriars Canterbury preserves rare fragments of a 1237 Dominican priory, a monastery run by a prior, that straddled the River Stour: its dining…
- Near Canterbury
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Blackfriars, Gloucester
Gloucestershire
Britain's most complete surviving Dominican friary (a house of friars, who worked among townspeople rather than withdrawing from them) is not a rui…
- Near Gloucester
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Blackfriars, Hereford
Herefordshire
A working Dominican priory: a monastery headed by a prior: reduced by Henry VIII's closure of the monasteries in the 1530s to a handful of walls, a…
- Near Hereford
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Blackfriars, Leicester
Leicestershire
A Dominican monastery built over a Roman townhouse whose mosaics rank among Britain's finest, and beside a mass grave now linked to an 11th-century…
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Blackfriars, Oxford
Oxfordshire
The community traces an unbroken teaching tradition older than Oxford's colleges, yet the building on St Giles' dates only to 1929: a 400-year gap…
- Near Oxford
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Blackfriars, Winchelsea
East Sussex
A royal foundation that shifted site twice before settling in the heart of Winchelsea, then vanished so completely that its stones were carried off…
- Near Winchelsea
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Tomb or burial place · Prehistoric
Blackhammer Chambered Cairn
Orkney Islands
Blackhammer Chambered Cairn preserves a Neolithic, the late Stone Age, burial monument dating from roughly 4000–2500 BC, on Rousay in Orkney.
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Medieval
Blackness Castle
Falkirk
Blackness Castle is a Firth of Forth fortress transformed from Crichton residence and state prison into an advanced artillery work, prison and ammu…
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Building or ruin · Prehistoric
Blackpatch
West Sussex
A Neolithic flint mine with Bronze Age barrows built over it: two thousand years of use on the same patch of down.
- Easy path
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Fortified place · Medieval
Bladon Castle
Derbyshire
A castle that was never meant to defend anything: its battlements front little more than a single long wall, built purely for effect.
- Near Bakewell
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Ancient place · Medieval
Blaenavon Ironworks
Torfaen
An ironworks whose struggle with cheap, high-sulphur ore pushed forward the technology of ironmaking.
- Near Blaenavon
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Fortified place · Medieval
Blaenllynfi Castle
Powys
A privately owned ruined stone castle near Bwlch, probably of the early thirteenth century and captured several times.
- Near Bwlch
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Fortified place · Medieval
Blair Castle
Perth and Kinross
The ancestral home of Clan Murray and historic seat of the Dukes of Atholl.
- Near Blair Atholl
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Fortified place · Prehistoric
Blaise Castle Estate
Bristol
A folly built to fake a medieval past gave its name to a Neoclassical mansion, a landscaped gorge and nine cottages that became the template for ev…
- Easy path
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Building or ruin · Medieval
Blakeney Guildhall
Norfolk
Blakeney Guildhall preserves a rare fourteenth-century vaulted undercroft (the arched stone cellar beneath a building) near the quay, reflecting me…
- Near Blakeney
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Sacred place · Prehistoric
Blakey Topping standing stones
North Yorkshire
Four surviving stones, one now doing duty as a gatepost, may be the last fragments of a stone circle or paired alignment some seventeen metres across.
- Rough ground
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Sacred place · Medieval
Blanchland Abbey
Northumberland
The monks prayed for a mist to hide them from Scottish raiders, got one, and then rang the bells in celebration.
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Fortified place · Medieval
Bleddfa Castle
Powys
A castle of mound and courtyard near Llangunllo, known also as Bledeach or Bledvach.
- Near Llangunllo
- Easy path
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Fortified place · Medieval
Blenkinsopp Castle
Northumberland
Blenkinsopp Castle captures the long conversion of a medieval border tower into a Victorian mansion, then a fire-damaged ruin with a surviving dome…
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Building or ruin · Roman
Blestium
Monmouthshire
Blestium beneath Monmouth combines one of Wales’s earliest Roman forts with a strategic Monnow-valley campaign base, later ironworking and evidence…
- Easy path
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Fortified place · Medieval
Bletchingley Castle
Surrey
A Norman earthen castle above Bletchingley village, where the earthworks survived largely undisturbed beneath later woodland.
- Near Bletchingley
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Medieval
Bletsoe Castle
Bedfordshire
The birthplace, in 1441 or 1443, of Margaret Beaufort: mother of Henry VII and grandmother of the entire Tudor dynasty.
- Near Bletsoe
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Fortified place · Iron Age
Blewburton Hill
Oxfordshire
Three distinct building phases and a violent final abandonment were followed, centuries later, by an early Anglo-Saxon cemetery dug straight into t…
- Near Blewbury
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Ancient place · Prehistoric
Blick Mead
Wiltshire
A spring that never freezes drew hunter-gatherers to camp beside it for four thousand years, leaving the densest concentration of Mesolithic (the m…
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Iron Age
Bloodgate Hill Iron Age Fort
Norfolk
Bloodgate Hill is Norfolk’s largest known Iron Age (roughly 800 BC until the Roman conquest) hillfort, a 210-metre circular enclosure whose survivi…
- Some walking
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Building or ruin · Pictish & early medieval
Blowing Stone
Oxfordshire
A pierced boulder said to have summoned King Alfred's army before Ashdown - and to have lent Thomas Hughes a piece of Victorian schoolboy slang.
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Sacred place · Prehistoric
Blue cairn circle
Aberdeenshire
The recumbent slab lies squared and deliberate rather than fallen, and the stone cairn (a mound of piled stones, often covering a burial) heaped in…
- Near Logie Coldstone
- Rough ground
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Sacred place · Roman
Blue Man-i'-th'-Moss
North Yorkshire
A single weathered stone on open moorland still carries a painted name, a Victorian carving, and a boundary role that has outlived every explanatio…
- Rough ground
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Sacred place · Prehistoric
Bluestonehenge
Wiltshire
A stone circle stripped of its stones, this henge: a bank and ditch enclosing a circular space: on the River Avon appears to be the very source of…
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Sacred place · Medieval
Blyth Priory
Nottinghamshire
A Benedictine monastery dedicated to St Mary the Virgin, founded in 1088 by Roger de Busli as an offshoot of a French house at Rouen.
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Sacred place · Medieval
Blythburgh Priory
Suffolk
The lesser of the two churches at Blythburgh, and the one that did not survive.
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Tomb or burial place · Prehistoric
Bocan Stone Circle
County Donegal
A scattered ring of standing stones on Bocan Hill said to be lined up on a sightline running clear across the sea to Jura in Scotland.
- Near Clonmany
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Iron Age
Boddington Camp
Buckinghamshire
A single rampart: a defensive bank of earth or stone: and ditch enclose some six hectares of wooded hilltop east of Wendover, one of the largest de…
- Near Boddington
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Medieval
Bodelwyddan Castle
Denbighshire
A Tudor manor rebuilt twice over: once as Greek Revival, once as dramatic Gothick castle: before serving as a girls' school, a war hospital and a n…
- Easy path
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Fortified place · Medieval
Bodiam Castle
East Sussex
Bodiam is the iconic English moated quadrangular castle, designed in 1385 for both defence and display and now conserved as a National Trust landmark.
- Near Bodiam
- Some walking
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Tomb or burial place · Prehistoric
Bodowyr
Isle of Anglesey
A passage-grave chamber of a form more common in Ireland than Wales, standing on flat ground with Snowdon and the Glyderau visible on the horizon.
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Medieval
Boghead (bastle)
Northumberland
Boghead is a rare, relatively unmodified border bastle (a fortified farmhouse of the Anglo-Scottish border, with livestock housed below) whose defe…
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Fortified place · Medieval
Bolbec Castle
Buckinghamshire
A stronghold Hugh II de Bolbec had no right to build, raised without royal licence during a civil war and condemned by a pope before Cromwell finis…
- Near Whitchurch
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Medieval
Bolebroke Castle
East Sussex
A modest Tudor hunting lodge with an outsized claim to fame: reputedly the base from which Henry VIII pursued his courtship of Anne Boleyn.
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Fortified place · Medieval
Bolesworth Castle
Cheshire
A castellated sandstone mansion remodelled by the architect of Portmeirion, still run by the family that bought it in 1856 and now known as much fo…
- Near Tattenhall
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Fortified place · Medieval
Bolingbroke Castle
Lincolnshire
A future king was born within these walls: Henry Bolingbroke, later Henry IV, giving the ruin a direct line to the English crown.
- Easy path
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Fortified place · Medieval
Bolsover Castle
Derbyshire
A working medieval stronghold was abandoned to ruin, then rebuilt from scratch in the 1600s as a fantasy of turrets and painted ceilings meant pure…
- Near Bakewell
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Medieval
Bolton Castle
North Yorkshire
A single family has held these walls since 1379: surviving a royal burning, Civil War slighting, and six months as prison to a captive Scottish queen.
- Some walking
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Sacred place · Medieval
Bolton Priory
North Yorkshire
A west tower begun in 1520 still stands two-thirds short of its planned height, beside a nave (the western body of the building, where the congrega…
- Easy path
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Building or ruin · Medieval
Bonawe Iron Furnace
Argyll and Bute
A charcoal-fired blast furnace that once employed 600 people to strip local woodland for fuel, shipping its pig iron south to Cumbria rather than f…
- Near Taynuilt
- Easy path
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Fortified place · Medieval
Bondgate Tower
Northumberland
Bondgate Tower is Alnwick’s surviving medieval gateway, turning a town-wall project of the Percy earls into a working feature of the modern street.
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Building or ruin · Medieval
Bontnewydd Palaeolithic site
Denbighshire
The jaw and teeth of an eleven-year-old Neanderthal boy, found here, make this the only site in Britain with fossils of a classic Neanderthal.
- Rough ground
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Sacred place · Medieval
Bordesley Abbey
Worcestershire
Founded during the civil war of the Anarchy and claimed by a rival for the English crown, this Cistercian ruin was also a medieval earl's burial pl…
- Easy path
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Fortified place · Iron Age
Boringdon Camp
Devon
Boringdon Camp is a scheduled bank-and-ditch monument above the Plym Valley, layered over an older ring ditch and dating from the period the centur…
- Rough ground
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Fortified place · Roman
Borough Hill
Northamptonshire
One of Britain's largest Iron Age hillforts lies beneath a working BBC transmitter mast: three thousand years of settlement crowned by shortwave br…
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Fortified place · Iron Age
Borough Hill Roman villa
Northamptonshire
A Roman villa with its own hypocaust heating system, deliberately reburied by its Victorian excavator to protect it: so the past survives precisely…
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Medieval
Borthwick Castle
Midlothian
Borthwick Castle is an exceptionally complete 1430 Scottish tower house, associated with Mary, Queen of Scots and visibly marked by Cromwell’s 1650…
- Near Borthwick
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Fortified place · Medieval
Borve Castle, Benbecula
Outer Hebrides
On the machair at the south-west tip of Benbecula, in the Western Isles, the ruined shell of a three-storey tower house stands with its north wall…
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Sacred place · Prehistoric
Boskednan stone circle
Cornwall
Boskednan stone circle is a partially restored late Neolithic (the first farming age, roughly 4000–2500 BC) or early Bronze Age (roughly 2500–800 B…
- Near Penzance
- Rough ground
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Fortified place · Medieval
Bossiney Castle
Cornwall
Bossiney Castle is a scheduled Norman motte (the earthen mound a castle was raised on) whose private, largely unexcavated mound preserves the early…
- Near Penzance
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Boston Priory
Lincolnshire
The foundations of the priory, a monastery run by a prior, lay hidden beneath the parish church for nearly six hundred years, surfacing only when r…
- Near Boston
- 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
Black Abbey
County Kilkenny
Kilkenny’s Black Abbey is a 1225 Dominican foundation restored after suppression, where Ireland’s largest stained-glass window crowns a long histor…
- Near Kilkenny
- Easy path
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Fortified place · Roman
Black Hill Roman Camps
Perth and Kinross
Two Roman camps within the extensive military complex centred on the fort at Ardoch.
- Some walking
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Sacred place · Medieval
Blackborough Priory
Norfolk
Blackborough Priory was a Benedictine nunnery near King’s Lynn from about 1200 to 1537, remembered through fishpond remains, named prioresses and i…
- Near King’s Lynn
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Sacred place · Medieval
Blackfriars, Newcastle upon Tyne
Tyne and Wear
Nine of Newcastle's craft guilds leased it in 1552 and used it as their headquarters. That is the only reason any of the town's five friaries still…
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Sacred place · Medieval
Blackmore Priory
Essex
Blackmore Priory survives through the fabric of its parish church, where an Augustinian community’s twelfth-century entrance and fifteenth-century…
- Easy path
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Fortified place · Medieval
Blackrock Castle
County Cork
Blackrock Castle began as Cork’s anti-piracy river fort and now hosts an observatory, turning a harbour defence into a place for public astronomy.
- Near Cork
- Easy path
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Fortified place · Prehistoric
Blackwater Castle
County Cork
Blackwater Castle layers a Norman fortress over a much older promontory fort: a headland cut off by ramparts to make a defensible enclosure: preser…
- Near Lismore
- Easy path
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Fortified place · Medieval
Blarney Castle
County Cork
Blarney Castle is a MacCarthy stronghold whose fifteenth-century keep carries the Blarney Stone, connecting a turbulent medieval history with Irela…
- Near Blarney
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Medieval
Bledisloe Tump
Gloucestershire
A timber castle and a mysterious raised mound once watched over the River Severn here, destroyed in the 1970s and leaving only rival theories about…
- Easy path
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Fortified place · Medieval
Block House (Melcombe)
Dorset
Melcombe’s lost Block House records an early modern town-built artillery fort, showing how Weymouth’s harbour communities developed local defences…
- Near Weymouth
- Easy path
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Building or ruin · Roman
Blue Bell Hill
Kent
Blue Bell Hill is a protected North Downs chalk landscape above the Medway where the lost Blue Bell Hill Dolmen, nearby Medway Megaliths and traces…
- Near Aylesford
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Sacred place · Medieval
Boa Island figures
County Fermanagh
The Boa Island figures are enigmatic damaged stone idols whose two-faced form, Christian graveyard setting and uncertain Iron Age (the period from…
- Near Kesh
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Sacred place · Medieval
Boarbank Hall
cumbria
A house recorded on this site since at least 1592, rebuilt in Italian style after a fire in 1870, and a working convent since 1921: with a 1986 ora…
- Near Ulverston
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Sacred place · Medieval
Bodmin Friary
Cornwall
A gateway and two pillars are the last visible pieces of a large Franciscan friary (the base of a mendicant order, whose members worked in the stre…
- Near Penzance
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Bodmiscombe Preceptory
Devon
Bodmiscombe Preceptory records a thirteenth-century Knights Hospitaller house whose absorption into Buckland Abbey preserves Devon’s link to the or…
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Tomb or burial place · Prehistoric
Bohonagh
County Cork
Bohonagh is a Bronze Age (roughly 2500–800 BC, when metalworking spread) axial stone circle with tall portal stones, a nearby cup-marked boulder bu…
- Near Clonakilty
- Some walking
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Building or ruin · Roman
Bokerley Dyke
Dorset
Bokerley Dyke is a long-lived Dorset boundary earthwork (a bank or ditch dug and heaped from the ground itself, with no masonry), first prehistoric…
- Near Woodyates
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Iron Age
Bolt Tail
Devon
Bolt Tail preserves faint remains of an ancient fort built across a South Hams headland, later marked by nearby shipwrecks.
- Rough ground
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Sacred place · Medieval
Bolton Abbey
North Yorkshire
Bolton Abbey joins an Augustinian priory, a living parish church and a vast Wharfedale estate in a layered Yorkshire Dales landscape.
- Some walking
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Sacred place · Medieval
Bolton Abbey, Moone
County Kildare
A modern Cistercian monastery in County Kildare, founded from Roscrea in 1965 and independent since 1977, where monastic life is supported by a wor…
- Near Moone
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Sacred place · Medieval
Bonamargy Friary
County Antrim
Bonamargy Friary preserves a late Franciscan foundation where MacQuillan, MacDonnell, burial, legend and manuscript histories meet beside the Margy…
- Near Ballycastle
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Sacred place · Medieval
Bonby Priory
Lincolnshire
Bonby Priory’s surviving St Andrew’s Church is the last trace of a Benedictine alien priory connected with St Fromond Priory between 1199 and 1403.
- Near Bonby
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Fortified place · Iron Age
Borough Hill, Sawston
Cambridgeshire
A broad oval enclosure some 430 metres across, ringed by more than one bank and ditch: a defensive scheme built at real scale, not a token boundary.
- Near Sawston
- Some walking
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Sacred place · Prehistoric
Boscawen-Un
Cornwall
Boscawen-Ûn is a Bronze Age (roughly 2500–800 BC, when metalworking spread) stone circle whose nineteen-stone ellipse, distinctive central slab and…
- Near Penzance
- Some walking
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Tomb or burial place · Prehistoric
Bosiliack Barrow
Cornwall
Bosiliack Barrow is a rare Neolithic (the first farming period in Britain, roughly 4000–2500 BC) entrance grave of a form otherwise associated with…
- Near Penzance
- Some walking
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Sacred place · Prehistoric
Boswens Menhir
Cornwall
Boswens Menhir is a compact but distinctive Penwith standing stone, with a vestigial cairn (a mound of piled stones, often covering a burial) and c…
- Near Penzance
- Easy path
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Building or ruin · Prehistoric
Botallack Mine
Cornwall
Engine houses on the cliffs mark a Cornish mine whose workings extended beneath the Atlantic and later formed part of a World Heritage Site.
- Near Penzance
- Rough ground
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