Tour the house that stood in for Wayne Manor

Walk the formal gardens Lutyens simplified and Gertrude Jekyll's herb garden

Stand on the concert lawn where Oasis played to 250,000 over two nights

Walk the dinosaur trail through the park woods

Knebworth has belonged to the Lytton family since 1490, and the Victorian rebuilding covered the Tudor house in turrets, domes and gargoyles — which is why it was used as Wayne Manor in Batman in 1989. Since 1974 the lawns have held some of the biggest concerts in Britain, from Led Zeppelin to Oasis.

Knebworth: Wayne Manor and the Concert Lawn

See the mosaics and hypocaust in Verulamium Park

Visit the shrine of St Alban in the cathedral

Verulamium grew into a major Roman town of some 125 acres, sacked by Boudica and rebuilt; Watling Street ran through it, and it had a forum, a basilica and a theatre whose remains are still visible, with mosaics from its houses in the museum. Above it, the abbey church was raised near the traditional site of the martyrdom of Alban, the first British martyr, with Roman bricks from the ruined town built into its tower.

St Albans: Verulamium and the Martyr's Shrine

Tour the Warner Bros. Studio Tour London – The Making of Harry Potter at Leavesden, walking through the Great Hall set and Diagon Alley

See Dumbledore's office and the Ministry of Magic sets

Stand on platform nine and three quarters with the Hogwarts Express

See the 1:24 model of Hogwarts used for the exterior shots

Warner Bros. built the Harry Potter films at Leavesden, on the site of Leavesden Aerodrome, a wartime de Havilland aircraft factory, and kept the sets when the shooting finished: the Great Hall, Diagon Alley, the Hogwarts Express on its platform, the Forbidden Forest and the 1:24 model of the castle that was filmed for the exteriors.

Leavesden: The Harry Potter Studio Tour

Walk among the veteran pollarded hornbeams

Visit Queen Elizabeth's Hunting Lodge, the grandstand built for Henry VIII's hunts in 1543

Find the Iron Age earthwork at Ambresbury Banks

Walk to Connaught Water and look for the fallow deer

Epping Forest runs twelve miles from the edge of London into Essex, saved when public outcry pushed the City of London Corporation to buy it — the first big win of the environmental movement in Europe — and the Corporation owns it still. It holds thousands of veteran pollarded hornbeams and oaks, the Iron Age earthworks of Loughton Camp and Ambresbury Banks, and the Tudor building now called Queen Elizabeth's Hunting Lodge.

Epping Forest: Twelve Miles of Ancient Pollards

See the bronze doors and museum at the Bunyan Meeting

Walk the Embankment gardens along the Great Ouse

Visit the Higgins Bedford and its Victorian collections

Find the statue of Bunyan at the top of the High Street

John Bunyan came from Elstow near Bedford, joined the nonconformist Bedford Meeting and became a preacher, and out of his years in Bedford came The Pilgrim's Progress; the Bunyan Meeting keeps bronze doors showing scenes from the book and the John Bunyan Museum telling his story. The Great Ouse runs through the middle of the town between long embankment gardens, and the Higgins holds the Handley-Read collection of Victorian decorative art.

Bedford: Bunyan's Town on the Great Ouse

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

Tour Wembley Stadium, the 90,000-seat stadium under its 133m arch, opened in 2007

Visit Lord's Cricket Ground and the MCC Museum, home of the Ashes urn

Visit the Wimbledon Lawn Tennis Museum and Centre Court

Wembley seats 90,000 under a 133m arch that can be seen across London; Lord's has been the home of cricket since 1814 and keeps the Ashes urn in its museum; and Wimbledon has been played on grass at the All England Club since 1877.

London's Sporting Legacy: Wembley, Lord's and Wimbledon

See the rescued lions in the Lion Country reserve

Walk the whole park circuit and find the Amur tigers

The Yorkshire Wildlife Park opened outside Doncaster in 2009 on an old farm and now holds about 500 animals of 100 species. In 2010 it rescued thirteen lions from a Romanian zoo and built Lion Country for them, and in 2014 it opened Project Polar for polar bears, starting with a 500kg male called Victor.

Yorkshire Wildlife Park: Polar Bears in South Yorkshire

Walk down into Polperro past the Shell House to the harbour

Visit the Polperro Heritage Museum of Smuggling and Fishing

Polperro is a fishing village packed into a cleft with a harbour that can be shut against the sea by a gate, and smuggling reached its height here in the late 18th century, financed by a local merchant, Zephaniah Job, known as the Smugglers' Banker. The Heritage Museum on the quay tells that story, and Looe, four miles east, is a working fishing port either side of a seven-arched bridge.