Landmarks & Monuments
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Avebury’s stones draw crowds around midwinter, but the story behind the solstice here is more nuanced than the Stonehenge version. Here is what the heritage bodies actually say, and how to visit.
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Free to enter and gloriously overgrown, Abney Park is a Victorian garden cemetery holding more than 200,000 burials, from Salvation Army founder William Booth to the Welsh nurse Betsi Cadwaladr.
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In August 1620 the Mayflower and Speedwell lay at Southampton before setting out for America. A stone column on Western Esplanade, unveiled by the American ambassador in 1913, marks the spot.
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No city lost more when Titanic sank than Southampton. Its memorials, to engineers who stayed at their posts and a band that played on, sit a short walk apart.
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Lights have warned ships off the Goodwin Sands from this Kent clifftop since the 14th century, and the Victorian lighthouse that stands here now was the first to shine an electric light and picked up the first international radio message.
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A Chilterns village given to St Albans Abbey in 796, with a 12th-century church that became Dibley’s St Barnabas and a hilltop smock mill made famous by Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.
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A granite column on a Chilterns hilltop, raised in 1832 for the duke who pioneered Britain’s canal age, with a 172-step climb to views that reach Canary Wharf.
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A 5,000-year-old Neolithic tomb on the Cotswold escarpment above Winchcombe, with a grand front entrance that was never a way in.
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Massive earthwork banks on the edge of Cirencester mark the arena of Roman Corinium, which seated around 8,000 before it became a fortress.
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A cross-shaped setting of Lewisian gneiss raised before the main circle at Stonehenge, and ticketed for the first time in 2026. Here is its history, its satellite circles and how to visit.