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

Stourhead and Longleat

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

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 down and back up the cobbles of Gold Hill

Look out over the Blackmore Vale from Park Walk

Walk the foundations of Shaftesbury Abbey

See the Gold Hill Museum at the top of the hill

Shaftesbury stands on a greensand ridge 215m up with the Blackmore Vale spread below it, and Gold Hill drops off the edge in a cobbled curve between the abbey wall and a row of cottages — the hill Ridley Scott used in the 1970s for the Hovis advert. Alfred the Great founded the abbey here in 888 and made his daughter Ethelgifu its first abbess; it became one of the richest religious houses in the country before the dissolution took it in 1539.

Shaftesbury: Gold Hill Above the Blackmore Vale

Photograph the Milky Way from Win Green (277m), the highest point of Cranborne Chase

Drive to Ashmore, at 700ft the highest village in Dorset, and stargaze from the village

Find the surviving terminal bank of the Dorset Cursus on Thickthorn Down, the end of a 10km Neolithic monument now known mostly from aerial photographs

Cranborne Chase is a chalk plateau across Dorset, Wiltshire and Hampshire, rich in Neolithic and Bronze Age monuments, with Iron Age settlements on the downs such as Badbury Rings, and in 2019 it became an International Dark Sky Reserve. Its highest point is Win Green, 277m, and across it ran the Dorset Cursus, a Neolithic earthwork 10km long, now mostly ploughed out.

Cranborne Chase International Dark Sky Reserve

Stand under the scissor arches at the crossing

Count figures on the 300-statue west front

Watch the swans ring the bell for food at the Bishop's Palace moat

When the central tower of Wells Cathedral began to sink, the master mason William Joy braced the piers with strainer arches — the scissor arches that now define the crossing. The west front carries 300 sculpted figures, and beside the cathedral runs Vicars' Close, reportedly the oldest residential street in Europe with its original buildings intact, built for the Vicars Choral with their hall finished in 1348.

Wells: The Scissor Arches and a Medieval Street Still Lived In

Find the Holy Thorn in the churchyard of St John the Baptist on the High Street, the tree that flowers at Christmas and again in spring

At Glastonbury Abbey, find the marked site of Arthur and Guinevere's tomb before the high altar, where the bones the monks claimed to have found in 1191 were reburied in 1278

Climb Glastonbury Tor, 158 metres, to the roofless tower of St Michael's Church and look out over the Somerset Levels

Drink from the Chalice Well, the Red Spring, in its gardens below the Tor

Glastonbury Tor is a conical hill of clay and Blue Lias, capped with hard sandstone, rising to 158 metres out of the Somerset Levels, with the roofless tower of St Michael's Church on top. Its Welsh name was Ynys Wydrin, the Isle of Glass, and the monks of the abbey below made it Avalon: destroyed by fire in 1184 and rebuilding slowly as pilgrims fell away, the abbey announced in 1191 that it had found the tomb of Arthur and Guinevere in its cemetery. The last abbot, Richard Whiting, was hanged, drawn and quartered on the Tor in 1539. The Glastonbury thorn flowers twice a year, in winter and in spring, and a flowering sprig is sent to the monarch every Christmas; and at the foot of Chalice Hill the Chalice Well, the Red Spring, has been in almost constant use for at least two thousand years.

Glastonbury: Tor, Thorn and Holy Spring

Walk the show caves along the underground Axe

Watch a paper-making demonstration at the mill

Look at the cheese maturing in the cave temperature

The River Axe runs out of the limestone at Wookey Hole through a series of chambers that have been open to visitors since 1927, with the stalagmite known as the Witch of Wookey in the first of them. A mill has worked the resurgent water since Domesday, and the paper mill, founded about 1610 and the oldest surviving handmade paper mill in Britain, now shows paper-making as a museum demonstration; the constant cool of the caves is used to mature Cheddar cheese.

Wookey Hole: The Caves, the Witch and the Oldest Paper Mill

Walk through the linked garden rooms one after another

Find the White Garden and the Fuchsia Garden among the rooms

Look at the box, hornbeam and yew hedges that make the walls

Walk out into the Cotswold countryside the garden looks over

Hidcote, at Hidcote Bartrim near Chipping Campden, is one of the best-known and most influential Arts and Crafts gardens in Britain, laid out as linked 'rooms' divided by hedges, each with its own planting of rare trees, shrubs and herbaceous borders. It was made by Lawrence Johnston, an American who took British citizenship and fought in the Boer War, on an estate his mother bought in 1907. The National Trust has it now.

Hidcote: The Garden Made of Rooms

Find Europe's only surviving pineapple pit, heated by rotting manure

Go down into the Jungle, the wild valley of subtropical tree ferns

Find the Mud Maid and the Giant's Head, made from rocks and plants

Walk down to the harbour at Mevagissey afterwards

The Tremayne family laid out these gardens near Mevagissey from the middle of the 18th century to the start of the 20th, in the Gardenesque style, with each area given a different character. Then the First World War took the gardeners and the whole thing was left to the brambles for seventy years, until a restoration in the 1990s brought it back and made it famous through television and books. They are now among the most visited gardens in Britain.