Things to do in Cambridgeshire

Brancaster Beach is one of the finest and most unspoiled beaches on the north Norfolk coast, a long stretch of sand and dunes within the Norfolk Coast Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty that combines exceptional natural beauty with some of the best walking on any beach in England. The beach faces north across the Wash and the southern North Sea, backed by the extensive Brancaster Staithe saltmarshes and managed by the National Trust as part of the broader north Norfolk coastal estate. The approach to the beach from the village of Brancaster or Brancaster Staithe crosses the saltmarsh on a narrow footpath or boardwalk, passing through one of the finest saltmarsh habitats in East Anglia on the way to the beach. The saltmarsh itself is a nationally important habitat for its plant communities and the extraordinary diversity of invertebrate life it supports, and the transition between the tidal marsh and the dune system is rich in wading birds and wildfowl particularly at high tide when birds are pushed off the mudflats and concentrate in the drier areas of the marsh. The beach beyond the dunes is wide, clean and relatively uncrowded even in summer, the distance from the car park and the modest facilities of the nearby village ensuring that only those prepared to walk can access the best sections. The sand flats exposed at low tide extend considerable distances and provide habitat for cockles and other shellfish that support a small commercial harvest and a significant population of feeding waders and gulls. The views from the beach across to Scolt Head Island, the tidal island that closes the western end of the bay, and to the distant outline of the north Norfolk coast extending toward Holkham are superb. The RSPB reserve at Titchwell Marsh a few miles to the west is one of the finest birdwatching sites in Britain and combines perfectly with a Brancaster beach visit.

Burghley House near Stamford in Lincolnshire is one of the grandest and most complete Elizabethan country houses in England, a great mansion built between 1555 and 1587 by William Cecil, the first Lord Burghley and the most powerful minister of Elizabeth I's reign, whose combination of the extraordinary architecture, the outstanding art collection and the Capability Brown park landscape creates one of the most complete and most rewarding English country house experiences available. The house is the ancestral home of the Cecil family, Marquesses of Exeter, and continues in family occupation. The exterior of Burghley House is one of the most spectacular architectural compositions of the Elizabethan age, the great south front with its symmetrical towers, the decorated chimneys disguised as columns and obelisks and the ornate roofline creating a display of architectural ambition that sought to express in stone the power and sophistication of its builder. The combination of Gothic and classical elements in the facade reflects the transitional nature of Elizabethan architecture, which was absorbing the influence of the Italian Renaissance while remaining rooted in the English medieval tradition. The interior contains one of the finest collections of Italian Old Master paintings assembled in any English country house, including works by Veronese, Tintoretto and other sixteenth-century Venetian and Italian masters. The Heaven Room and Hell Staircase, painted by Antonio Verrio in the 1690s in a programme of baroque ceiling painting of considerable ambition, are the most celebrated interior spaces. The park was landscaped by Capability Brown in the 1750s and hosts the annual Burghley Horse Trials.

Cambridge University Botanic Garden is one of the finest botanic gardens in Britain, a 40-acre scientific collection and public garden in the heart of Cambridge that has been developed continuously since its establishment on the present site in 1846. The garden serves both as a living scientific collection for the University of Cambridge's research and teaching programmes and as a public garden of considerable horticultural quality and seasonal interest, and the combination of scientific rigour and aesthetic ambition has produced a garden that succeeds on both levels simultaneously. The garden was founded by Professor John Stevens Henslow, who was Charles Darwin's mentor at Cambridge and who directed the young Darwin toward natural history fieldwork that ultimately led to the development of evolutionary theory. Henslow recognised the inadequacy of the university's earlier botanical garden and secured the present site and resources to create a properly equipped scientific collection of plants from around the world. The scientific tradition Henslow established has been maintained and developed across nearly two centuries, with the garden's research collections and seed bank contributing to contemporary plant conservation and climate change research. The main features of the garden include the rock garden, one of the finest in any British botanic garden; the systematic beds, where plants are arranged by taxonomic family to allow direct comparison of related species; the glasshouses containing tropical, Mediterranean, arid and alpine plant collections; and the extensive winter garden designed to provide interest and colour during the quietest months of the horticultural year. The nine National Collections of genera hosted by the garden include nationally important holdings of Tulipa, Geranium and Fritillaria. The garden's location within Cambridge makes it an excellent complement to a visit to the university colleges, museums and the River Cam, and the combination of scientific interest and garden beauty makes it rewarding for visitors with widely varying backgrounds and interests.

Ely Cathedral rises above the flat fenland landscape of Cambridgeshire with the commanding presence of a great ship on a calm sea, its massive Norman nave and the extraordinary fourteenth-century Octagon and lantern tower visible across the fens from remarkable distances. The image of the cathedral floating above the surrounding plain has given rise to the affectionate epithet Ship of the Fens, and the building's exceptional visibility and its architectural achievements combine to make it one of the most important and most rewarding cathedrals in England. The Norman nave, begun in 1083 under Bishop Simeon, is one of the finest and most complete in England, its length of over 75 metres and the powerful Romanesque arches of its three storeys creating a building of great solemnity and architectural authority. The development of the eastern end in the Early English Gothic style added the elegant retrochoir and presbytery, while the Decorated Gothic Lady Chapel of 1321 to 1349 represents the most elaborate expression of that style in any English cathedral, its wall arcades carved with scenes from the life of the Virgin in a programme of sculptural decoration of exceptional ambition. The Octagon and lantern tower, designed by Alan of Walsingham to replace the Norman crossing tower that collapsed in 1322, are the supreme architectural achievement at Ely. Rather than simply rebuild the tower in conventional form, Alan created an octagonal space of stone covered by a timber-framed octagonal lantern supported on eight enormous oak posts, combining the structural ingenuity of Gothic vaulting with a central lantern that floods the crossing with natural light from eight windows. The engineering solution was entirely original, has never been precisely replicated and remains one of the great individual achievements of medieval architecture.

Flag Fen near Peterborough in Cambridgeshire is one of the most significant Bronze Age archaeological sites in Britain, a preserved wooden platform and post alignment dating from approximately 1300 to 900 BC that was discovered in 1982 and has been excavated and interpreted by archaeologist Francis Pryor in one of the most sustained and most publicly engaged excavation projects of the late twentieth century. The preserved wooden timbers of the Bronze Age structure survive beneath the fen peat in exceptional condition, and the site provides one of the most direct encounters with the Bronze Age world available in England. The Bronze Age post alignment at Flag Fen extends for approximately one kilometre across the ancient fenland from Northey Island to the Peterborough shore, a structure of approximately 60,000 individual timber posts that represented an enormous investment of labour and resources by the farming communities of the Bronze Age fens. The function of the alignment is uncertain but the large number of metal objects, weapons and personal ornaments deliberately deposited in the water beside the alignment suggests a ritual or votive dimension to the structure, perhaps marking a boundary between the world of the living on the dry land and the watery world of the spirits in the fen. The on-site museum and the active preservation work visible at the site provide the most direct public engagement with the Bronze Age environment of any comparable site in Britain, and the circular Iron Age roundhouse reconstructed at Flag Fen provides an excellent illustration of the domestic architecture of the period.

Fotheringhay in Northamptonshire is a small village on the River Nene whose castle, now reduced to a single grassy motte and a fragment of masonry, was the site of two of the most significant events in English history: the birth of Richard III in 1452 and the execution of Mary Queen of Scots in February 1587. The combination of these historical associations and the peaceful rural character of the village and its Norman church creates one of the most poignant heritage sites in the English Midlands. The execution of Mary Queen of Scots at Fotheringhay was one of the most dramatic and most consequential events of the Elizabethan period. Mary was imprisoned in various English castles for nineteen years before Elizabeth finally agreed to her execution following her implication in the Babington Plot of 1586. The execution took place in the great hall of the castle on 8 February 1587 and Mary's courage in the face of death, combined with the botched nature of the execution itself, created an immediate legend that has sustained popular interest in the event for four centuries. The village church of St Mary and All Saints, a magnificent Perpendicular Gothic church of the fifteenth century that was originally the collegiate church of the castle, preserves the tombs of Edmund of Langley and his wife in the chancel and provides a tangible connection to the medieval and Tudor history of this remarkable place. The riverside walk between the church and the castle motte provides the most direct encounter with the landscape that witnessed these events.

Houghton Hall in northwest Norfolk is one of the finest and most complete Palladian country houses in England, built in the 1720s for Sir Robert Walpole, Britain's first and longest-serving Prime Minister, by the architects Colen Campbell and James Gibbs and subsequently furnished by William Kent with some of the finest baroque interior decoration and furniture in any English house. The house is the seat of the Cholmondeley family, who inherited it from the Walpole line, and the combination of the extraordinary interior quality, the current Marquess's exceptional collection of contemporary sculpture in the park and the model village make Houghton one of the most distinguished and most rewarding English country house experiences available. The Stone Hall at the centre of the house, designed by William Kent and carved by John Michael Rysbrack, is one of the finest baroque interior spaces in England, its carved marble chimneypiece, the ceiling decoration and the quality of the craftsmanship throughout representing the work of the finest craftsmen available to the wealthiest politician in early Georgian England. The state apartments contain furniture and paintings of the highest quality, including works by Van Dyck, Rubens and other masters of the collection that Walpole assembled. The contemporary sculpture collection in the park, assembled by the current Marquess, provides one of the finest collections of contemporary sculpture in any English country house setting, works by Richard Long, James Turrell, Rachel Whiteread and many others placed in the parkland in a programme of considerable curatorial ambition.

Oundle is one of the finest and most complete small market towns in England, a Northamptonshire town of Jurassic limestone buildings, medieval street pattern and considerable architectural distinction that has survived the pressures of growth and development with an unusual degree of integrity. The town is dominated by Oundle School, one of the older English public schools, whose buildings form a significant part of the townscape and whose presence has given Oundle a cultural vitality and an architectural investment that distinguish it from comparable Northamptonshire market towns. The core of the town around the market place and the Church of St Peter is a remarkably coherent collection of seventeenth and eighteenth-century limestone architecture, the local Barnack rag and Weldon stone giving the buildings a warm golden-brown colour that is characteristic of the limestone belt running through Northamptonshire and into the Cotswolds. The church itself has a fine medieval spire and interior of considerable quality, and the surrounding streetscape of the town has an architectural consistency that reflects several centuries of building in a single local material by craftsmen who understood its qualities. The Talbot Inn in the market place is one of the most historically interesting buildings in Oundle, a seventeenth-century coaching inn built partly from stone salvaged from Fotheringhay Castle, the castle a few miles to the north where Mary Queen of Scots was imprisoned and executed in 1587. The staircase within the Talbot is said to be the original from Fotheringhay, a claim that has never been definitively established but that adds a layer of resonant historical association to an already distinguished building. The Nene Valley and the water meadows surrounding the town provide excellent walking and cycling, and the village of Fotheringhay with its castle mound and fine church is a short drive away.

Oxburgh Hall in the Norfolk Breckland is a moated manor house of extraordinary architectural beauty and historical richness, a late fifteenth-century building of warm red brick rising from its wide rectangular moat in a composition of towers, gatehouse and domestic ranges that is one of the finest examples of medieval domestic architecture in eastern England. The National Trust manages the hall and its estate, and the combination of the building, the needlework collection within, the priest's hole, the French parterre garden and the Catholic chapel make Oxburgh one of the most rewarding and most layered historic house visits in Norfolk. The hall was built by Sir Edmund Bedingfield in 1482 and has remained in the Bedingfield family's ownership and occupation, latterly in partnership with the National Trust, for over five centuries, giving it an unusual quality of continuous family habitation rather than the sometimes institutional character of houses long separated from their original owners. The family's unwavering Catholic faith through the Reformation, recusancy and the penal years that followed created a history of particular interest, the priest's hole hidden within the gatehouse fabric providing direct physical evidence of the dangerous practice of sheltering Catholic priests when the penalty for doing so was death. The embroidery collection includes needlework by Mary Queen of Scots and Bess of Hardwick, created during Mary's captivity at Tutbury and at Chatsworth in the 1570s and of outstanding quality as a collection of Tudor decorative art. The pieces worked by the imprisoned Scottish queen, whose situation of luxurious captivity gave her extraordinary amounts of time for needlework, are among the most intimate surviving objects associated with one of history's most compelling figures. The French parterre garden and the Victorian kitchen garden provide excellent outdoor interest to complement the house visit.

Peterborough Cathedral is one of the finest Norman cathedral churches in England, a building of exceptional scale and architectural quality whose west front, completed in the early thirteenth century, is arguably the most distinctive and most dramatic cathedral facade in Britain. The three enormous arches of the west front, each over twenty metres high, create a composition of breathtaking boldness that is entirely unique in European medieval architecture, their scale and the depth of the carved decoration making the Peterborough west front one of the most immediately impressive sights in English church architecture. The cathedral was founded as a Benedictine abbey in 655 by the Mercian King Peada and subsequently refounded after Viking destruction, reaching its architectural flowering between approximately 1118 and 1200 in the Norman building campaign that created the nave, transepts and choir. The Norman nave is one of the finest in England, its painted timber ceiling of approximately 1220 one of the rare surviving examples of medieval nave ceiling painting, the diamond and lozenge patterns in red, blue and gold creating a complete medieval interior experience of great richness. The cathedral has a remarkable royal connection through its role as the burial place of two queens. Catherine of Aragon, the first wife of Henry VIII, was buried in the cathedral in 1536 following her death at Kimbolton Castle, and a banner of the Spanish royal family marks her tomb in the north aisle. Mary Queen of Scots was buried here in 1587 following her execution at Fotheringhay, before her body was reinterred in Westminster Abbey by her son James I. The presence of both queens whose lives were so consequentially connected to Henry VIII gives Peterborough Cathedral a remarkable historical resonance.

Sandringham Estate in northwest Norfolk has been a private royal residence for over 160 years, purchased by the Prince of Wales, the future King Edward VII, in 1862 on the advice of Queen Victoria who recognised the value of a private country property away from the formalities of state. The estate encompasses approximately 8,000 hectares of farmland, woodland and formal gardens around the main house, and its connection to the personal and informal life of successive generations of the royal family gives it a character quite distinct from the official royal palaces open to visitors in London. The house itself is a substantial Victorian country house built in the Jacobean Revival style between 1870 and 1900, replacing an earlier house on the site that the Prince of Wales found insufficiently grand for his purposes. The style, which draws on the elaborate decorative vocabulary of Elizabethan and Jacobean architecture, was fashionable among the Victorian wealthy as an expression of English heritage and tradition. The house is not architecturally distinguished in the way that Balmoral or Windsor Castle are, but it has the comfortable, lived-in character of a house that has been genuinely used and loved rather than simply maintained for public display. Sandringham is most famous as the place where the royal family spends Christmas, a tradition established by Edward VII and maintained with remarkable consistency ever since. The church of St Mary Magdalene in the grounds, in which the family worships on Christmas Day, attracts considerable media attention each year, and the practice of the royal family walking from the house to church and greeting members of the public gathered outside has become one of the most familiar rituals of the British royal year. The house and parts of the grounds are open to visitors during the summer season when the royal family is not in residence. The house tours provide access to a number of ground-floor rooms furnished as they are used by the family, including the main drawing room, dining room and the Saloon, the principal reception space. The museum in the old stables contains a remarkable collection of royal memorabilia, vintage cars and shooting and sporting equipment accumulated over generations. The formal gardens surrounding the house include the Norwich Gates, presented to the Prince and Princess of Wales as a wedding gift in 1863, and the extensive parkland beyond provides pleasant walking around the estate's country tracks and woodland.

Snettisham RSPB Reserve on The Wash in northwest Norfolk is the site of one of the most spectacular wildlife events regularly witnessed in Britain, a tidal roost of wading birds in which up to 300,000 knot, dunlin and other species are compressed by the advancing tide onto a narrow strip of shingle in a display of aerial acrobatics that is one of the defining wildlife spectacles of the British calendar. The reserve has become one of the most visited RSPB sites in England specifically for this event, and the experience of watching the knot flocks performing their synchronised manoeuvres at close range is one that repeatedly generates expressions of genuine awe from observers. The roost is at its most spectacular around high tide when the birds are forced from the tidal flats by the rising water and compress onto the shingle ridges of the reserve in ever-denser concentrations. The movements of huge numbers of birds in tight, synchronised flocks, twisting and turning in formations that create shifting grey and silver patterns against the sky, are driven by the individual responses of each bird to its neighbours, producing a collective behaviour of extraordinary visual complexity from simple local rules. The timing of the roost depends on the tidal cycle and the best displays are at the highest spring tides of the year. The reserve also supports breeding and wintering wildfowl and waders in considerable variety, and the shingle beaches provide nesting habitat for oystercatchers, ringed plover and little terns. The wider landscape of The Wash, the largest tidal estuary system in Britain, provides context for the reserve's wildlife in one of the most important wetland systems in northern Europe.

Stamford in Lincolnshire is widely regarded as the finest stone town in England, a market town of extraordinary architectural quality built almost entirely from local oolitic limestone that gives it a pale cream colour and a streetscape of remarkable consistency and beauty. The combination of medieval churches, seventeenth and eighteenth-century town houses, the absence of significant modern development and the setting beside the River Welland creates a townscape used repeatedly as a film location when historical England is required. The town was one of the five Danish boroughs of the Danelaw and the five medieval parish churches demonstrate the prosperity of a community that was one of the most significant commercial centres in the east Midlands. The Georgian architecture of St Mary's Street, Barn Hill and St George's Square is the most celebrated quality of the townscape, the eighteenth-century rebuilding creating the streetscapes that are the architectural highlights of any walk through the town. The nearby Burghley House, one of the grandest Elizabethan houses in England, provides an architectural complement to the town visit. The combination of the town quality, the surrounding Lincolnshire and Northamptonshire countryside and the accessibility from the East Midlands makes Stamford one of the most rewarding small towns in the region.

Titchwell Marsh RSPB Reserve on the north Norfolk coast is one of the most visited and most rewarding bird reserves in Britain, a mosaic of fresh and saltwater habitats including a large freshwater lagoon, saltmarsh, reedbed and beach that provides breeding, wintering and migration habitat for an exceptional variety of species. The reserve consistently provides sightings of more bird species in a single visit than almost any comparable area in Britain. The freshwater lagoon provides nesting habitat for avocet, common tern, little tern and various duck species in spring and summer, its margins attracting waders in considerable variety during autumn migration. The avocet, the RSPB's emblem, recolonised Titchwell after the reserve was established and the colony is one of the most accessible in Britain. The reedbed provides nesting habitat for bittern, marsh harrier and bearded tit in one of the most productive reedbeds on the north Norfolk coast. The proximity of Titchwell to other major reserves including Holkham NNR, Cley Marshes and Snettisham allows a series of coastal bird reserves to be visited in a single trip to this section of the coast, making north Norfolk one of the finest birdwatching destinations in Britain.

Wicken Fen in Cambridgeshire is the oldest nature reserve in Britain, a fragment of the original fenland that once covered vast areas of East Anglia that has been managed by the National Trust since 1899 and provides the only surviving example of the natural fen habitat that has been almost completely drained and converted to agriculture across the rest of the region. The combination of the extraordinary ecological importance, the historical depth of the conservation tradition and the remarkable wildlife accessible at close range makes Wicken Fen one of the most significant natural heritage sites in England. The fen supports an exceptional variety of wildlife adapted to the wetland habitats of open water, reedbed, sedge fen and fen meadow that have largely disappeared from the wider fenland landscape. Over 8,000 species of plants, insects and animals have been recorded on the reserve, including over 1,000 beetle species alone, a diversity that reflects the complexity of the ancient fen ecosystem and the sustained quality of the management that has maintained it. The National Trust is engaged in a long-term project to extend the fen by purchasing and rewetting surrounding farmland, aiming to create a fen of approximately 5,300 hectares over the next hundred years in one of the most ambitious rewilding projects in England. The project is converting intensive arable land back to wetland habitat in a reversal of the drainage that destroyed the original fen, creating new habitat for the wildlife that has survived in the Wicken fragment. The fen tower hide and the board-walked trails through the reed provide excellent wildlife watching in every season.