Walk the towpath the length of the 29 locks

Watch a narrowboat work through the sixteen-lock straight

Look at the side pounds built to hold the water

Walk into Devizes along the canal from the top lock

John Rennie's answer to the hill outside Devizes was a flight of 29 locks rising 72m in 3.2km on the Kennet and Avon Canal — the sixteen in the straight line up the slope are a scheduled monument. They were the last part of the 87-mile canal between Bristol and Reading to open, in 1810, and a boat takes five or six hours to work the whole flight.

Caen Hill: Twenty-Nine Locks Up the Hillside

Avebury and Caen Hill

Portsmouth

A week-long loop from Portsmouth: Nelson's flagship in the Historic Dockyard, ponies in the New Forest, the stones of Stonehenge and Avebury, and Winchester at the start of the South Downs Way.

The New Forest and Stonehenge from Portsmouth

Avebury

Eleven nights from Bath to the New Forest: the Roman Baths and Brunel's Bristol, Cheddar Gorge and Glastonbury Tor, the stone circles of Avebury and Stonehenge, and the ponies and deer of the forest.

Wessex: Bath, Stonehenge and the New Forest

Walk the full circuit of the henge bank and the outer circle

Walk the West Kennet Avenue of paired stones

Avebury is a henge with the largest megalithic stone circle in the world and two smaller circles inside it, built over several hundred years in the third millennium BC. A village grew up inside the bank in the Middle Ages and later residents pulled down many of the stones; Alexander Keiller re-erected what he could in the 1930s. Silbury Hill, the tallest prehistoric mound in Europe, and the West Kennet Long Barrow stand within walking distance.

Avebury: The Largest Stone Circle in the World

Walk down the street from the market cross to the bridge

Stand on the bridge over the By Brook in the village that played Puddleby-on-the-Marsh in Doctor Dolittle

Castle Combe drops down a wooded Cotswold valley to a bridge over the By Brook, with a 14th-century market cross, Cotswold stone cottages and almost nothing built in the old centre since about 1600. It played the little port of Puddleby-on-the-Marsh in the 1967 film Doctor Dolittle, when the production dammed the stream, and there is a racing circuit on the old airfield above it.

Castle Combe: The Village in the Valley

Tour the Roman Baths, around the Sacred Spring of Sulis Minerva, and taste the spa water in the Georgian Pump Room; the city is a UNESCO World Heritage Site

Walk the Royal Crescent, built by John Wood the Younger between 1767 and 1774, and visit No. 1 Royal Crescent

Walk The Circus, begun by John Wood the Elder in 1754

Tour the Jane Austen Centre on Gay Street, in the city where she lived from 1801 to 1806

Walk across Pulteney Bridge, Robert Adam's shop-lined bridge of 1774

Bath is a World Heritage Site for two reasons. The Romans built their baths round the Sacred Spring of Sulis Minerva, and the Georgian Pump Room still serves the water. The Georgians built the city: John Wood the Elder began the Circus in 1754, his son built the Royal Crescent in 1767–74, and Robert Adam's Pulteney Bridge of 1774 carries shops across the Avon. Jane Austen lived here from 1801 to 1806.

Bath: The Roman Baths, the Royal Crescent and Pulteney Bridge

Visit Stonehenge, the Neolithic stone circle whose bluestones were brought from the Preseli Hills in Wales, and its visitor centre

Walk the Avenue and the Cursus in the wider landscape

See the Neolithic houses and the collection at the visitor centre

Walk out to the barrow cemetery on King Barrow Ridge

Stonehenge was built and rebuilt over 1,500 years from about 3000 BC, and most of its smaller bluestones were brought from the Preseli hills in west Wales, some 240km away, by means still argued over. The sarsens came from much nearer, and the whole monument sits in a landscape of barrows, avenues and the Cursus.

Stonehenge: The Bluestones from Wales

Drive the safari park through the lions and the monkeys

Tour the Elizabethan house and its state rooms

Walk the Capability Brown parkland around the lake

Longleat is an Elizabethan prodigy house that took twelve years to build and is still the seat of the Marquesses of Bath, standing in a thousand acres of parkland that Capability Brown laid out, with four thousand acres of woodland around it. In 1949 it became the first stately home in Britain to open to the public on a commercial basis, and then went further: the estate holds the first safari park established anywhere outside Africa, so you drive your own vehicle through the animals.

Longleat: The First Safari Park Outside Africa

Walk the full circuit of the lake past the temples

Go into Flitcroft's Pantheon and his Temple of Apollo of 1765

Tour the Neo-Palladian house and its library

Cross the five-arched Palladian Bridge and find the grotto

Henry Hoare, son of a wealthy banker, bought this Wiltshire estate at the source of the River Stour in 1717, and what his family made here is one of the most famous gardens in the English landscape style anywhere — a lake with classical temples set round it so that the view composes itself as you walk. The 2,650-acre estate also holds a Grade I listed Neo-Palladian mansion and the village of Stourton, and it has been part-owned by the National Trust since 1946.

Stourhead: The English Landscape Garden Perfected

Walk the shell-lined passage to the altar chamber

Look for the patterns and guess at the symbols

See the current exhibition at Turner Contemporary by the harbour

See the Scenic Railway at Dreamland, the Grade II* listed wooden roller coaster retired in 2026

Under a Margate street runs a winding chalk passage 21m long ending in a rectangular chamber, and almost every surface of it is covered in mosaic made of about 4.6 million shells — some 190m² of it. It was rediscovered around 1835 and opened to the public in 1837, and nobody knows who made it, when, or why. Above ground, Margate has Turner Contemporary by the harbour and the Dreamland amusement park.

Margate: The Shell Grotto Nobody Can Explain

Climb through the broken keep and the leaning towers

Find where the walls were blown apart in the slighting

Ride the Swanage Railway steam train to the village

Walk up West Hill for the classic view of the castle in its gap

William the Conqueror built Corfe Castle in the gap the Purbeck Hills leave between Wareham and Swanage. Sir John Bankes bought it in 1635, and while he was away with the king his wife Mary led the defence through two sieges; when it finally fell, Parliament ordered it slighted in March 1646, which is why the towers lean and split the way they do.