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

Visit Shakespeare's Birthplace on Henley Street, the house where he is believed to have been born in 1564

Watch a play at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre, beside the Avon

Visit Anne Hathaway's Cottage at Shottery, the farmhouse of Shakespeare's wife

Stand in the garden of New Place, the site of Shakespeare's last home, and see Holy Trinity Church, where he is buried

William Shakespeare is believed to have been born in 1564 in the house on Henley Street, and he is buried in Holy Trinity Church by the Avon. The garden of New Place marks the site of his last home, his wife's family farmhouse is Anne Hathaway's Cottage at Shottery, and the Royal Shakespeare Theatre stands on the river.

Stratford-upon-Avon: Shakespeare's Birthplace and the RSC

Try to count the stones of the King's Men — the accepted count is 77, but legend says no one will ever count them three times and get the same number

Stand at the King Stone and recite the witch's prophecy: "Seven long strides shalt thou take, and if Long Compton thou canst see, King of England thou shalt be" — then take seven paces toward the valley and try to locate Long Compton village below; the hill crests just enough to block the view

Walk the 400m from the circle to the Whispering Knights portal dolmen — four standing stones around a fallen capstone, named in legend for knights who lagged behind whispering treachery against the king; they mark a Neolithic burial chamber that predates the circle by approximately 1,000 years

Three separate prehistoric monuments stand on the ridge along the Oxfordshire–Warwickshire border near Chipping Norton: the King's Men stone circle (77 stones, 33 metres diameter), the King Stone single monolith, and the Whispering Knights portal dolmen — the oldest of the three at around 5,500 years. All three are connected by the legend of a witch who turned a marching king and his entire army to stone with a single prophecy.

Rollright Stones: The Witch's Army

Explore Warwick Castle, the medieval castle begun by William the Conqueror in 1068 beside the River Avon

Watch the trebuchet, Britain's largest working siege machine, and the Falconer's Quest birds of prey show

Visit St Mary's Church in Warwick, and the Beauchamp Chapel with the 15th-century tomb of Richard Beauchamp

William the Conqueror began Warwick Castle in 1068 beside the River Avon, and it now has Britain's largest working trebuchet and a birds of prey show. In the town, St Mary's Church holds the Beauchamp Chapel and the 15th-century tomb of Richard Beauchamp.

Warwick Castle and the Beauchamp Chapel

See the Royal Pump Rooms on the Parade and the art gallery and museum inside

Walk the Regency terraces of the Parade and Lansdowne Circus

Spend an afternoon in Jephson Gardens by the Leam

Walk through the Pump Room Gardens and Victoria Park

Leamington Priors was a small village until its water got a reputation for medicinal qualities in the 18th century; it grew into a spa town, renamed Royal Leamington Spa in 1838, which is why parts of the Parade, Clarendon Square and Lansdowne Circus have especially fine Regency architecture. The Royal Pump Rooms still stand on the Parade, now home to the town's art gallery and museum, with Jephson Gardens and the Pump Room Gardens beside them.

Royal Leamington Spa: Regency Terraces and the Pump Room

Walk the mosaic floors and bath houses at Chedworth

Find the nymphaeum, the spring shrine at the villa

See the Corinium mosaics in the museum at Cirencester

Walk the amphitheatre earthworks on the edge of Cirencester

Chedworth, founded about AD 120 and rebuilt in the 4th century, is one of the largest and most elaborate Roman villas found in Britain: a dining room with a fine mosaic floor, two separate bathing suites for damp and dry heat, and an apsidal shrine built around the spring that supplied it. It was discovered in 1864 and opened to visitors soon after. Eight miles south, Cirencester was Corinium Dobunnorum, by area the second largest town in Roman Britain, and the Corinium Museum holds mosaic floors from its town houses and the country around.

Cirencester and Chedworth: Corinium and a Roman Villa

Swim in the open-air lido, reopened in 2007 and filled with brine diluted to the saltiness of the sea

Find the Norman church of St Andrew where St Richard was probably baptised

Walk the Salwarpe, whose name probably means the river that throws up salt

Droitwich sits on massive salt deposits worked since ancient times — the Romans called it Salinae — and the natural brine underneath holds two and a half pounds of salt to the gallon, ten times stronger than sea water and rivalled only by the Dead Sea. The town's fortune was built on it: the brine baths opened in 1830, for floating in something that dense rather than for drinking. They have long closed, the last in 2008, but the open-air lido, reopened in 2007, is filled with brine diluted to the saltiness of the sea. John Corbett, the salt king, industrialised the trade and remade the town as a spa, and built Chateau Impney for his wife in the French château style; it has been closed since 2020.

Droitwich Spa: The Town Built on Brine Ten Times Saltier Than the Sea

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.