Things to do in Lancashire

Blackpool Pleasure Beach is the most visited theme park in Britain and one of the most visited in Europe, an amusement park of 42 acres on the South Shore of Blackpool that has been operating continuously since 1896 and contains one of the finest collections of historic rides and rollercoasters in the world alongside modern attractions of the highest technical specification. The park has never lost the democratic, populist character of its Victorian and Edwardian origins, remaining genuinely accessible and genuinely thrilling across its entire range and maintaining the tradition of the seaside pleasure ground that has been a cornerstone of British working-class leisure since the late nineteenth century. The historic rides at Pleasure Beach are among the most significant surviving examples of early twentieth-century fairground engineering anywhere in the world. The Big Dipper of 1923 and the Grand National of 1935 are wooden roller coasters of the classic American style that provided the template for virtually all subsequent coaster design, and their preservation in operational condition while continuing to provide genuine thrills for modern riders represents an achievement of considerable engineering and conservation significance. The Big One, when it opened in 1994 as the tallest roller coaster in the world, represented the modern continuation of this tradition of headline-grabbing attraction building. The Ice Arena at Pleasure Beach has been producing ice shows of professional quality since the 1930s, a tradition that places it in a different category from most amusement parks and reflects Blackpool's broader ambition to provide entertainment of theatrical quality alongside its fairground attractions. The indoor rides and attractions provide options for days when the notoriously unpredictable Blackpool weather makes outdoor visiting uncomfortable. Blackpool as a resort has reinvented itself several times since its Victorian peak and continues to attract millions of visitors annually, with the Pleasure Beach forming the centrepiece of an evening economy based in no small part on the famous Illuminations that transform the resort each autumn.

Cartmel is one of the most charming and most complete small villages in the Lake District, a medieval settlement in the low-lying Cartmel Peninsula south of the main Lake District mountains whose combination of the magnificent Augustinian priory church, the medieval gatehouse, the racecourse on the village green and the reputation for exceptional food, particularly the Cartmel sticky toffee pudding, creates one of the most rewarding and most distinctive small destinations in Cumbria. The village retains its medieval character in an unusually complete form for a settlement of its age and quality. The Cartmel Priory, one of the finest medieval churches in Cumbria, was founded in 1190 and its survival through the Dissolution is attributed to its role as the parish church of the local community, a status that protected it when the adjacent monastic buildings were destroyed. The interior contains an exceptional collection of medieval misericords, monuments and stained glass that makes it one of the most rewarding ecclesiastical visits in the northwest of England. The uniquely positioned diagonal tower, crossing the roof at an angle to the building below, is the most architecturally distinctive feature of a church of considerable overall quality. The village racecourse, one of the smallest and most atmospheric in England, hosts meetings on the Whitsun and August Bank Holiday weekends that have been held here since the seventeenth century and create a unique atmosphere combining horse racing with the character of a medieval village green.

Downham in the Ribble Valley of Lancashire is one of the most perfectly preserved estate villages in England, a settlement of stone cottages on the southern slopes of Pendle Hill whose combination of the complete absence of television aerials, satellite dishes or any modern visual intrusion, the ancient stocks on the village green, the Hall and the Church and the extraordinary backdrop of Pendle Hill creates a scene of English village life so complete in its historical character that it has been used as a film location for numerous period productions. The Assheton family have owned the village for over five hundred years and their care of its character has preserved it in a way that planning alone cannot achieve. The village's appearance is the result of the long-term investment by successive owners in the maintenance and improvement of the cottages while systematically excluding the intrusions that have compromised the visual character of most comparable villages. The result is a settlement that appears to exist outside normal time, the absence of the visual markers of contemporary life creating an atmosphere of historical completeness that is entirely genuine rather than manufactured. The village is closely associated with the Pendle Witch Trials of 1612, one of the most celebrated witch trials in English history, in which several women from the surrounding area were hanged following accusations of witchcraft. The Assheton family featured prominently in the trials and the village's connection to this episode of Lancashire history provides a darker dimension to what might otherwise appear too picture-perfect a destination.

The Forest of Bowland is an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty in Lancashire and North Yorkshire, a large upland area of heather moorland, gritstone hills and limestone valleys between the Yorkshire Dales and the Ribble Valley whose combination of the open moorland scenery, the excellent walking available on the Bowland fells and the characteristic landscape of drystone walls and field barns of the surrounding farmland creates one of the finest and least visited upland landscapes in northern England. The name Forest is used in its medieval sense of hunting ground rather than woodland. The moorlands of Bowland are among the finest habitats for upland birds in northern England, supporting breeding populations of merlin, peregrine falcon, hen harrier, short-eared owl, curlew and golden plover in concentrations that make the area one of the most significant upland bird habitats outside the Scottish Highlands. The hen harrier, in particular, breeds in Bowland in one of the most important southern populations in England, the open heather moorland providing the nesting and hunting habitat this species requires. The Trough of Bowland, a road pass crossing the highest part of the AONB, provides access to the finest moorland scenery and the starting point for the major walking routes onto the Bowland fells. The combination of the walking, the birdwatching and the characteristic Lancashire moorland landscape makes Bowland one of the most rewarding natural heritage destinations in the northwest.

The Ingleton Waterfalls Trail in the Yorkshire Dales near Settle is the finest waterfall walk in England, a circular route of approximately eight kilometres through two limestone gorges that visits a succession of waterfalls of varying character and scale in a landscape of exceptional geological and scenic interest. The trail was created in 1885 by a local landowner who recognised the commercial potential of the gorge waterfalls and has been maintained ever since as one of the most popular paid-entry walking experiences in the Yorkshire Dales. The trail visits seven principal waterfalls in the gorges of the Rivers Twiss and Doe, from the gentle Pecca Falls and the dramatic Thornton Force where the river plunges over the Great Unconformity, a geological boundary between 500-million-year-old Silurian slates below and much younger Carboniferous limestone above, to the spectacular Beezley Falls and the concluding Snow Falls in the return gorge. The variety of waterfall types, from plunge falls to cascade series to falls set in enclosed gorges, creates a walking experience of sustained scenic variety. The geological interest of Ingleton Waterfalls Trail is exceptional, the Great Unconformity at Thornton Force exposing a gap of approximately 250 million years in the rock record visible at a single geological boundary that can be touched and crossed in a single step. This boundary, where young limestone beds lie directly on very ancient Silurian rocks, is one of the most instructive examples of an unconformity available at any accessible site in Britain.

Lake Windermere is the largest natural lake in England, a ribbon of water approximately eighteen kilometres long set in the heart of the Lake District National Park between wooded hillsides and the lower fells that rise on both shores. It is the most visited lake in the district and the centre of much of the tourism that makes the Lake District the most visited national park in Britain, its combination of accessible scenery, historic associations, water sports facilities and the appealing towns and villages along its shores creating a destination of extraordinary popularity. The western shore of the lake, wilder and more wooded than the eastern shore where the main towns of Windermere, Bowness and Ambleside are concentrated, provides some of the most beautiful lakeshore scenery in Cumbria and is accessible via the Windermere ferry that crosses between Bowness and Far Sawrey. The National Trust estate of Claife Heights above the western shore offers excellent walking with views across the lake to the Langdale Pikes and the central fells, and Hill Top, Beatrix Potter's farmhouse at Near Sawrey, is one of the most visited National Trust properties in England. The lake has strong literary associations with the Romantic tradition. Wordsworth walked extensively in the surrounding countryside and the Lake District's scenery was the primary inspiration for his greatest poetry. John Ruskin lived at Brantwood above Coniston Water, within sight of Windermere's southern reaches, and Arthur Ransome's Swallows and Amazons was inspired by the landscape of Windermere and Coniston, giving the lake a place in the imaginative geography of generations of children. The Windermere Steamers, operating scheduled services on the lake since the Victorian period, provide a relaxing way to experience the changing character of the lake and connect the main lakeside villages without a car.

The Langdale Pikes are the most distinctive and most instantly recognisable mountain profile in the Lake District, a pair of rocky summits — Harrison Stickle at 736 metres and Pike of Stickle at 709 metres — that rise above Great Langdale in a profile of clean mountain architecture visible from far across the Lake District and providing one of the most satisfying ridge walks available in the national park. The combination of the distinctive profile, the excellent walking on the summit ridge and the famous views of Great Langdale below make the Pikes one of the essential walking destinations in the Lake District. The Neolithic stone axe factory on the slopes below Pike of Stickle is one of the most significant prehistoric industrial sites in Britain, the volcanic tuff of the fell providing a stone of exceptional quality for axe production that was traded across Neolithic Britain in large quantities. Axes from the Langdale workings have been found as far afield as southern England and Ireland, demonstrating the extent of the Neolithic exchange network that distributed this particular stone over such extraordinary distances from this remote Lakeland source. The walk from the Old Dungeon Ghyll Hotel at the valley head up to the Pikes provides one of the classic short mountain ascents in the national park, the path ascending steeply from the valley floor to the ridge with increasingly dramatic views of the surrounding fells and the valley below. The Langdale valley itself, with the Blea Tarn and the views to the Coniston Fells, is one of the finest valley landscapes in the Lake District.

Lytham Hall is a handsome Georgian country house standing within a parkland setting of over seventy acres at the heart of Lytham St Annes in Lancashire. Built in the mid-eighteenth century for the Clifton family, local landowners who shaped the development of the town for several hundred years, the hall represents one of the finest examples of Georgian domestic architecture in the northwest of England. The house was designed with the elegant proportions and restrained decorative vocabulary characteristic of the Palladian style that dominated British country house architecture in the mid-eighteenth century. The symmetrical stone facade, sash windows and carefully balanced interior rooms reflect the taste and cultural aspirations of the prosperous landed gentry who commissioned such buildings. Thomas Clifton, who inherited the estate in the 1740s, invested substantially in the house and grounds, establishing the parkland landscape that still frames the building today. The Clifton family's influence on the wider development of Lytham was considerable. As the major landowners in the area they controlled development, managed the sea defences and shaped the character of the town through their estate management decisions across several generations. The estate also included Lytham Windmill, the historic church of St Cuthbert and substantial agricultural holdings across the Fylde Plain. Following the decline of the Clifton family's fortunes in the twentieth century the hall was eventually acquired by British Gas and used as offices for several decades, a period during which the building suffered considerable neglect. It was purchased by a charitable trust in 2008 and has since been the subject of a sustained programme of restoration and conservation work funded through grants, community fundraising and heritage organisations. Today the hall hosts regular guided tours, exhibitions and community events that tell the story of the house and its owners. The parkland and woodland surrounding the building are open for walking throughout the year, and the seasonal events programme includes themed tours, craft fairs and heritage activities that make Lytham Hall an active and engaging community asset as well as a significant historic building.

Lytham Windmill stands on the Green at the heart of Lytham St Annes in Lancashire, one of the most recognisable landmarks on the Fylde Coast and a symbol of the town's maritime and agricultural heritage. The mill was built in 1805 and worked as a grain mill for several decades before ceasing commercial operations in 1922, and its distinctive white cylindrical tower has been carefully preserved as an important piece of local industrial history. The mill is a tower mill design, the most common type of windmill in Lancashire, with a rotating cap housing the sails that could be turned into the prevailing wind regardless of its direction. At its operational peak the mill used the strong westerly winds blowing off the Irish Sea to drive its millstones, grinding wheat and other grains into flour for the local community. The surrounding area of Lytham is flat agricultural land, characteristic of the Fylde Plain, and the mill originally dominated the skyline in a way that is hard to appreciate now that the town has grown around it. Today the mill houses a small museum telling the story of the building and its role in the agricultural and maritime history of Lytham. The green setting and the views across the Ribble Estuary from the surrounding area help place the mill within its original landscape context. Lytham Green itself is one of the most pleasant open spaces on the Lancashire coast, a broad strip of grass along the estuary shore that is popular with walkers and kite flyers. The town of Lytham is a genteel and well-preserved Victorian resort town with an attractive town centre, independent shops and a character distinctly different from the more brash resort of Blackpool a few kilometres to the north. Lytham Hall, a fine Georgian country house visible from the town, and the yacht clubs and sailing facilities along the estuary reflect the genteel character of the place that attracted prosperous Victorian and Edwardian families to settle here. The surrounding area also includes the famous Royal Lytham and St Annes Golf Club, one of the venues for The Open Championship.

Morecambe Bay is the largest expanse of intertidal sand and mudflat in Britain, a great tidal bay of approximately 310 square kilometres between the Lancashire coast and the Furness Peninsula whose combination of extraordinary wildlife spectacle, dramatic views of the Cumbrian mountains and the historic danger of quicksand and fast-moving tides creates one of the most powerful and most distinctive coastal landscapes in northern England. The wader flocks of Morecambe Bay are among the most impressive wildlife spectacles available in Britain, the vast mudflats supporting hundreds of thousands of dunlin, knot, oystercatcher, redshank and other wader species throughout winter. The spectacle of a large wader roost when the rising tide pushes birds onto the high-tide roost is one of the most extraordinary natural events available at any British wetland. The guided cross-bay walks with the official Queen's Guide to the Sands provide one of the most adventurous and most memorable outdoor experiences in Lancashire, the crossing of the six miles of sand and channels following ancient routes used since the Roman period.

Pendle Hill is a prominent moorland mass rising to 557 metres from the Lancashire plain south of Clitheroe, a hill whose dark and brooding profile and its association with the Pendle Witch Trials of 1612 have combined to give it an atmosphere of dark legend that persists to the present day and makes it one of the most evocative and most visited moorland hills in northern England. The trials of the Pendle Witches, in which twenty people from the hamlets around the hill were accused of witchcraft and ten eventually executed, represent one of the largest and most documented witch trials in English history and have given Pendle Hill a reputation that is simultaneously historical, folkloric and commercially celebrated. The witch trials arose from a complex of local disputes, poverty, fear and the zealotry of the new witch-hunting climate encouraged by James I, whose personal interest in witchcraft produced the Witchcraft Act of 1604 under which the accused were prosecuted. The principal accused came from two local families, the Demdikes and the Chattoxes, whose competing claims of magical power and mutual accusations created the chain of events that led to the Lancaster Assizes. The detailed account written by the court clerk Thomas Potts in 1613 provides an unusually complete record of the trial and the testimonies given. George Fox, the founder of the Quaker movement, climbed Pendle Hill in 1652 and experienced a vision from the summit that he described as seeing a great people to be gathered, an event that inspired his subsequent mission and makes Pendle Hill a place of Quaker pilgrimage as well as a site of witch legend. The summit walk from Barley or from the north side via Nick o' Pendle provides excellent moorland walking with outstanding views across Lancashire to the Fylde Coast and the Irish Sea.

The Ribblehead Viaduct carrying the Settle to Carlisle railway across the limestone valley at the head of Ribblesdale in the Yorkshire Dales is one of the most iconic and most photographed pieces of Victorian railway engineering in Britain, a structure of twenty-four arches spanning nearly 500 metres across the valley floor at a maximum height of 32 metres whose combination of bold engineering, Yorkshire millstone grit construction and dramatic setting below the peak of Whernside creates one of the defining images of the Dales landscape. Built between 1869 and 1875 by the Midland Railway using a workforce of over two thousand navvies who lived in temporary settlements around the construction site, the viaduct was nearly demolished in the 1980s before a campaign saved both the structure and the entire Settle to Carlisle line. The construction of the Ribblehead Viaduct and the Settle to Carlisle Railway was one of the most ambitious engineering undertakings of the Victorian period, driven by the Midland Railway's determination to reach Scotland by its own route without dependence on the competing companies whose lines provided the existing connections. The exposed and difficult terrain of the Yorkshire Dales and the Cumbrian fells required the construction of numerous tunnels, viaducts and embankments in challenging conditions, and the navvy camps established at Ribblehead during construction grew into temporary towns of several thousand people whose presence is recorded in the registers of the isolated moorland churches. The viaduct can be approached from the Ribblehead Station car park on the B6255 road, and the walk across the valley floor to the base of the piers provides close appreciation of the scale and quality of the masonry. The Three Peaks circular walk using Pen y Ghent, Ingleborough and Whernside as its targets passes close to the viaduct and the wide Ingleborough summit provides an aerial perspective on the structure in its landscape setting.

Rydal Mount in Cumbria was the home of the poet William Wordsworth for the last 37 years of his life, from 1813 until his death in 1850, and represents the most sustained domestic setting in the life of one of the greatest English poets. The house sits above the small lake of Rydal Water in a landscape of spectacular beauty that directly fed Wordsworth's imagination throughout the long final chapter of his writing life, and the garden he designed and tended here with considerable personal involvement preserves his horticultural vision almost exactly as he left it. The house itself is a comfortable sixteenth-century farmhouse extended in the eighteenth century that Wordsworth rented throughout his residence, never owning it outright. By the time he moved here he was already famous and the Lake District was well established as a destination for literary pilgrims who wished to see the landscapes that had inspired his poetry. The house attracted a constant stream of distinguished visitors throughout the Wordsworth years, including Thomas Carlyle, Harriet Martineau, Mary Shelley and Queen Adelaide, who visited in 1840. The garden at Rydal Mount reflects Wordsworth's particular vision of the relationship between nature and cultivation, a vision that rejected the formal or baroque style in favour of something that appeared to grow naturally from the landscape while actually being carefully planned and maintained. The terraced garden descends the hillside in a series of informal levels, with walks through trees and shrubbery designed to reveal successive views across the valley rather than presenting a single designed prospect. The terracing and the upper woodland area above the house are substantially as Wordsworth left them. Inside the house, which remains in the ownership of Wordsworth's descendants, the rooms preserve an atmosphere of lived-in domesticity rather than the formal museum quality of many literary houses. The study where Wordsworth worked, the drawing room where family and guests gathered and the bedrooms are furnished with period pieces including some that belonged to the Wordsworth family. The surrounding Lake District landscape, Rydal Water below and the fell path that Wordsworth walked daily to dictate his poetry to his sister Dorothy and wife Mary while composing out of doors, can be explored through the public footpaths that thread through the valley.

Tarn Hows in the Lake District National Park is one of the most visited and most beloved landscapes in Britain, a tarn set among larch, Scots pine and mixed woodland whose combination of the reflective water, the surrounding trees and the gentle hills creates a scene of such perfect composition it appears almost designed rather than natural. The National Trust manages the surrounding area and the walking circuit of the tarn is one of the most popular short walks in the Lake District. The tarn is in fact partly artificial, created in the late nineteenth century when a landowner dammed several smaller tarns to create the single larger water body visible today. The planting of the surrounding woodland that frames the tarn so perfectly was also part of the Victorian landscape improvement. Beatrix Potter owned the Tarn Hows area as part of her conservation programme and bequeathed it to the National Trust. The Red Squirrel Trust maintains a population of native red squirrels around Tarn Hows and the squirrels can often be observed at feeders near the car park. The combination of the accessible circular walk, the scenic quality and the wildlife interest make Tarn Hows one of the most visited and most consistently appreciated short walks in the Lake District.

White Scar Cave near Ingleton in the Yorkshire Dales is the longest show cave in Britain, a system of limestone caverns extending over a kilometre into the Great Scar Limestone beneath the slopes of Ingleborough that provides one of the most varied and most spectacular underground experiences available in the British Isles. The guided tour takes visitors through a sequence of passages, caverns and formations whose variety of scale and character includes the enormous Battlefield Cavern, one of the largest cave chambers in Britain, discovered only in 1990. The cave was discovered in 1923 by Cambridge student Christopher Long who explored it by candlelight and subsequently developed it as a show cave, opening it to visitors in 1925. The original passages explored by Long are characterised by the Rough Stream, an underground river whose course must be followed for part of the route, and the cave retains the character of an active cave system in which water continues to shape the geology and the formations. The Battlefield Cavern, 100 metres long and 30 metres high with the ceiling covered in calcite straw formations, is the visual highlight of the cave and one of the most impressive cave chambers in Britain. The stalactites and stalagmites of various passages, some of considerable scale, demonstrate the full range of speleothem formation types developed over the hundreds of thousands of years of the cave's history. The location of White Scar Cave at the foot of Ingleborough, with the Three Peaks walk passing nearby, makes it an excellent destination combined with the walking available in this section of the Dales.