We've just added something we're really excited about: 52 hand-picked places to visit, all dropped onto the Featured layer on the map.
These aren't the usual big-name castles and cathedrals. They're the gems a little further off the beaten track: a village where cars are banned and donkeys still work the cobbles, a fantasy town built by one architect over fifty years, an aqueduct that carries boats through thin air, and a nuclear bunker hidden under a bungalow. Many are run by small independent charities and trusts, and every one of them is worth a day out.
Fifty-two is no accident, either. That's one for every week of the year, so consider this your ready-made calendar of adventures. Together they span from a 5,500-year-old stone circle to a Cold War bunker on standby into the 1990s, across England, Scotland and Wales, and they include a handful of UNESCO World Heritage Sites along the way.
Here's the full line-up, grouped by the kind of place they are.
Villages frozen in time
- Clovelly: a car-free cliff village of cobbles and donkeys (Devon)
- Portmeirion: an Italianate fantasy village on a wooded Welsh peninsula (Gwynedd)
- Blanchland: honey-stone cottages built from the ruins of a medieval abbey (Northumberland)
- Milton Abbas: a curving street of near-identical thatched cottages (Dorset)
Model villages of the industrialists
- Saltaire: a UNESCO-listed Victorian mill village, now home to a Hockney collection (West Yorkshire)
- Port Sunlight: a soap magnate's leafy Arts and Crafts garden village (Merseyside)
- New Lanark: Robert Owen's utopian cotton-mill village in a Clyde gorge (South Lanarkshire)
Step-into-the-past open-air museums
- Beamish: 300 acres of living Georgian, Victorian and 1950s life (County Durham)
- Black Country Living Museum: rebuilt canalside streets that starred in Peaky Blinders (Dudley)
- Blists Hill Victorian Town: swap your money for old coins and spend them in a gaslit town (Shropshire)
- Morwellham Quay: a Victorian copper port with an underground mine railway (Devon)
- Weald and Downland Living Museum: fifty rescued buildings and the home of The Repair Shop (West Sussex)
- Ryedale Folk Museum: moorland life, witch-posts and all (North Yorkshire)
- Avoncroft: Britain's first open-air building museum, plus a collection of vintage phone boxes (Worcestershire)
- Chiltern Open Air Museum: rescued buildings that doubled for Downton Abbey (Buckinghamshire)
Mills, machines and mighty engineering
- Cromford Mills: the birthplace of the modern factory (Derbyshire)
- Kelham Island Museum: home to Europe's most powerful working steam engine (Sheffield)
- Middleport Pottery: Britain's last working Victorian pottery, still making Burleigh ware (Stoke-on-Trent)
- Gladstone Pottery Museum: the last complete potbank, bottle kilns and all (Stoke-on-Trent)
- Anderton Boat Lift: the towering "Cathedral of the Canals" (Cheshire)
- Pontcysyllte Aqueduct: the tallest navigable aqueduct in the world (Wrexham)
- Clifton Suspension Bridge: Brunel's masterpiece across the Avon Gorge (Bristol)
- The Piece Hall: a grand Georgian cloth hall, saved by a single vote (Halifax)
- Wentworth Woodhouse: the longest country-house facade in Britain (South Yorkshire)
Into the earth: caves and mines
- Wookey Hole Caves: river-carved caverns and a petrified witch (Somerset)
- Cheddar Gorge and Caves: England's largest gorge, home of Cheddar Man (Somerset)
- Kents Cavern: some of the oldest human remains in Britain (Devon)
- Blue John Cavern: the only source on earth of the purple Blue John stone (Derbyshire)
- Poole's Cavern: a show cave used by people since the Bronze Age (Derbyshire)
- Clearwell Caves: 4,500 years of iron and ochre mining (Gloucestershire)
- Mother Shipton's Cave: a petrifying well and England's oldest visitor attraction (North Yorkshire)
- Geevor Tin Mine: clifftop tin workings on the wild Cornish coast (Cornwall)
- Magpie Mine: Britain's best-preserved lead mine (Derbyshire)
Deep in prehistory
- Vindolanda: a Roman fort still being dug, home of the famous writing tablets (Northumberland)
- Bignor Roman Villa: some of Britain's finest mosaics, sheltered under thatch (West Sussex)
- Butser Ancient Farm: full-size prehistoric and Roman houses rebuilt from scratch (Hampshire)
- Rollright Stones: a Bronze Age stone circle wrapped in legend (Oxfordshire)
- Jorvik Viking Centre: ride through the sights, sounds and smells of Viking York (York)
- Scottish Crannog Centre: an Iron Age loch dwelling brought back to life (Perthshire)
- Flag Fen: a 3,500-year-old Bronze Age causeway preserved in the peat (Cambridgeshire)
Ships and the sea
- SS Great Britain: Brunel's revolutionary iron steamship, home at last in Bristol (Bristol)
- Chatham Historic Dockyard: the world's most complete age-of-sail dockyard (Kent)
- RRS Discovery: Scott and Shackleton's Antarctic ship, back in the city that built her (Dundee)
Follies, mysteries and marvels
- Bletchley Park: where the codebreakers cracked Enigma (Buckinghamshire)
- Shell Grotto: 4.6 million shells arranged by unknown hands (Kent)
- Broadway Tower: a hilltop folly beloved of the Pre-Raphaelites (Worcestershire)
- The Forbidden Corner: a labyrinth of tunnels, follies and surprises (North Yorkshire)
- Rosslyn Chapel: dizzyingly intricate carving and Da Vinci Code fame (Midlothian)
- The Lost Gardens of Heligan: a great garden rescued from decades of neglect (Cornwall)
The twentieth century remembered
- Eden Camp: the wartime home front recreated in a genuine POW camp (North Yorkshire)
- Kelvedon Hatch Secret Nuclear Bunker: a vast bunker hidden beneath an ordinary bungalow (Essex)
- Hack Green Secret Nuclear Bunker: a once-secret Cold War government headquarters (Cheshire)
Three to start with
Fifty-two is a lot to take in, so here are three very different favourites to whet your appetite.
Bletchley Park (Buckinghamshire)
Behind the gates of an unremarkable Victorian estate, thousands of people, a great many of them women, worked in absolute secrecy to break the enciphered messages of Nazi Germany. Building on earlier Polish work, Alan Turing and his colleagues designed the Bombe machines that unpicked the "unbreakable" Enigma cipher, and the resulting intelligence is credited with shortening the war by up to two years. Bletchley was also the birthplace of modern computing: to crack the even tougher Lorenz cipher, engineer Tommy Flowers built Colossus, the world's first programmable electronic digital computer. Saved from demolition in the 1990s, the huts and mansion are now beautifully restored, and you may recognise them from The Imitation Game.
Portmeirion (Gwynedd)
One man, one lifelong obsession. The Welsh architect Sir Clough Williams-Ellis began building Portmeirion in 1925 and kept going for fifty years, arranging pastel cottages, colonnades and a green dome around a central piazza with the eye of a stage designer rather than a town planner. Inspired by the Italian coast, and partly assembled from fragments of demolished buildings rescued across Britain, it became a "home for fallen buildings", and, in the late 1960s, the surreal backdrop to the cult TV series The Prisoner. Come for the architecture, then lose an afternoon in the subtropical Gwyllt woodland gardens.
Shell Grotto (Kent)
Sometimes the best mystery is the one no one can solve. Hidden beneath an ordinary Margate street, this underground passage and chamber are lined with around 4.6 million seashells worked into altars, motifs and flowing patterns. It was reputedly discovered in 1835, and yet, to this day, no one knows who made it, when, or why. Theories range from an ancient pagan temple to a rich man's folly, but not a single record has ever come to light. You move through it in near silence, marvelling at the patience it must have taken, whoever was responsible.
Records and firsts
If you like a good superlative, the Featured layer has plenty:
- The world's first programmable electronic computer, Colossus, was built at Bletchley Park.
- The tallest navigable aqueduct on earth: Pontcysyllte carries boats 126 feet above the River Dee.
- The longest country-house facade in Britain stretches over 600 feet at Wentworth Woodhouse.
- The only place on the planet where Blue John stone is mined: the Blue John Cavern.
- Europe's most powerful working steam engine, the River Don Engine, thunders into life at Kelham Island.
- England's oldest visitor attraction: Mother Shipton's Cave has charged admission since 1630.
- Britain's oldest complete skeleton, Cheddar Man, was found in Cheddar Gorge, around 10,000 years old.
- The world's first successful water-powered cotton mill kick-started the factory age at Cromford.
How to find them
Open the map in Visit History and switch on the Featured layer to see all 52 dotted across the country. Tap any one to read its story, plan a route, and, once you've been, log your visit like any other site.
So here's a challenge for the year ahead: how many of the 52 can you tick off? Whether you start with the one nearest home or map out a grand tour, we hope these additions point you toward a few places you'd never have found otherwise.
As always, we'd love to hear which ones you visit, and if there's a hidden gem you think belongs on the Featured layer, let us know.