Go down into the Roman temple vaults under the castle keep

Walk the Roman wall and through the Balkerne Gate

See the Roman Circus Centre, the only chariot circus known in Britain

Colchester was Camulodunum, the first Roman capital of Britain, and its castle keep — the largest of its kind anywhere in Europe — was built in the second half of the 11th century on the foundations of the Roman Temple of Claudius, which is why it is so wide. Boudica burned the town in AD 60 or 61; the Roman wall, the Balkerne Gate and the only known Roman chariot circus in Britain are all still here.

Colchester: Roman Britain's First Capital and the Largest Norman Keep

Walk Dedham, the village in Dedham Vale National Landscape, and see St Mary's church, whose tower appears in Constable's paintings

Visit the Munnings Art Museum at Castle House in Dedham, the home of the painter Sir Alfred Munnings

Walk a section of the Stour Valley Path, the 60-mile route through the valley

Dedham is the village at the heart of Dedham Vale, and the tower of its church, St Mary's, appears in John Constable's paintings. The painter Sir Alfred Munnings lived at Castle House, now the Munnings Art Museum. The Stour Valley Path runs 60 miles through the valley.

Dedham: Constable's Church and the Munnings Museum

Stand in front of Flatford Mill, where Constable painted The Hay Wain, and find Willy Lott's Cottage across the water

Work out which bank is Suffolk and which is Essex — the Stour is the county line

Visit Bridge Cottage beside the mill, owned by the National Trust with the mill and Willy Lott's Cottage

Walk up to East Bergholt, where Constable was born, and find the wooden bell cage of 1531 in St Mary's churchyard

Flatford Mill on the Stour, in Dedham Vale on the Suffolk–Essex border, was owned by John Constable's father, and the mill and its surroundings are the setting of many of his paintings. Its date-stone says 1733; the National Trust owns it, with Bridge Cottage, Valley Farm and Willy Lott's Cottage, and the Field Studies Council has run it as a field centre since 1943. The Hay Wain, finished in 1821 and now in the National Gallery, was painted from the front of the mill, with Willy Lott's Cottage on the far left — and because the river is the county boundary, the left bank in the picture is Suffolk and the right is Essex. Constable was born up the hill in East Bergholt, whose church has never had a tower: work on one stopped when Cardinal Wolsey fell in 1530, and the next year a wooden bell cage was put up in the churchyard as a temporary home for the bells. It is still there, and the bells in it are rung by turning the headstocks by hand rather than with ropes.

Constable Country: Flatford Mill and The Hay Wain

Visit Sutton Hoo, the Anglo-Saxon burial ground where Basil Brown uncovered the ship burial in 1939

Walk out to the burial mounds above the River Deben

See the reconstruction of the burial chamber and the replica finds in the exhibition hall

Walk the estuary path along the Deben below the mounds

Under a mound above the Deben, Basil Brown found the print of a 27m ship in the sand in 1939, with a burial chamber most likely made for an East Anglian king, probably Rædwald — helmet, shoulder clasps, gold buckle, silver from Byzantium — one of the most significant archaeological finds ever made in England. The ship itself had rotted away, leaving only its shape and its rivets.

Sutton Hoo: The Ship Burial Under the Mounds

Walk out along Southend Pier, 2.14km long and the longest pleasure pier in the world

Ride the pier railway, the first pier railway in the country, out to the pier head

Watch waders on the estuary mud at low tide

Southend Pier runs 2.14km (1.33 miles) out into the Thames estuary, the longest pleasure pier in the world, with its own railway along it because of the distance. The town grew as the Londoners' seaside, and at low tide waders feed on the estuary mud.

Southend: The Longest Pleasure Pier in the World

Visit St Edmundsbury Cathedral, the Gothic cathedral with its Millennium Tower completed in 2005

Walk the ruins of Bury St Edmunds Abbey in the Abbey Gardens, where the barons are believed to have sworn their oath in 1214

Tour the Greene King Brewery, founded in Bury in 1799

Have a drink in the Nutshell on the Traverse, one of several pubs that claim to be Britain's smallest

In the Abbey Gardens at Bury St Edmunds stand the ruins of the abbey where, by tradition, the barons swore in 1214 to force King John to accept the Charter of Liberties, which influenced Magna Carta. St Edmundsbury Cathedral's Millennium Tower was only completed in 2005. Greene King has brewed in the town since 1799, and the Nutshell on the Traverse is one of several pubs that claim to be Britain's smallest.

Bury St Edmunds: The Abbey Gardens and the Nutshell

Walk the rings of the turf maze on Saffron Walden common

Walk the timber-framed streets and see the pargeting

Tour Audley End House and its Jacobean great hall

Walk Capability Brown's park and the kitchen garden at Audley End

Saffron Walden took its name from the saffron crocus grown here in the 16th and 17th centuries, and on the common by the castle mound is a turf maze cut in circular channels, about 30m across and the largest of its kind in England. Just west of the town, Thomas Howard, 1st Earl of Suffolk, built Audley End on the site of a Benedictine abbey — a house of palatial size, in which he entertained James I — and Capability Brown landscaped the park.

Saffron Walden and Audley End: A Turf Maze and a Jacobean Palace

Go inside the reconstructed timber halls and sunken huts

See the finds from the original excavation in the museum

Walk the Breckland heath and the Lark in the country park

A real Anglo-Saxon settlement stood at West Stow from the 5th to the 7th century, and it was excavated and then rebuilt on the same ground: timber halls and sunken huts put up as an experiment, using only the tools and techniques the Anglo-Saxons had, to learn how they were built. The country park around it runs along the Lark through Breckland heath.

West Stow: The Anglo-Saxon Village Rebuilt on Its Own Site

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.