Things to do in Warwickshire

The Stratford Butterfly Farm in Stratford-upon-Avon is the largest butterfly house in the United Kingdom and one of the most popular family attractions in the Midlands, a tropical greenhouse environment where hundreds of free-flying exotic butterflies share a carefully maintained rainforest habitat with a remarkable collection of other tropical invertebrates and small creatures. Opened in 1985, the farm was a pioneering attraction in Britain when it was established and continues to provide a genuinely extraordinary encounter with the natural world. The main tropical greenhouse maintains the temperature, humidity and plant life of an equatorial rainforest, creating conditions in which species from across South America, Asia and Africa can complete their life cycles. The plants that fill the space include exotic flowering species chosen to provide both visual richness and the nectar sources that sustain the butterfly population. Walking through the greenhouse in high summer, with morpho butterflies with their iridescent blue wings catching the light and owl butterflies resting on fallen fruit, provides an experience of the tropical world available nowhere else in the British Midlands. The life cycle of the butterflies is observable at every stage within the farm. The emergence room allows visitors to watch adult butterflies emerging from their chrysalises, a process of transformation that is one of the most genuinely astonishing spectacles in the natural world. The variety of chrysalis forms, from the golden-spotted swallowtail to the extraordinary leaf-mimicking forms of other species, demonstrates the breadth of evolutionary solutions to the challenge of metamorphosis. Beyond butterflies, the farm maintains a fascinating collection of tropical insects. Leafcutter ants carry their plant fragments to their colony in a steady stream visible through a perspex tube running through the building. Giant millipedes, stick insects, praying mantises and a collection of tarantulas and other spiders provide additional encounters with the world's invertebrate diversity. The proximity to Stratford's other attractions, including Shakespeare's birthplace, the Royal Shakespeare Theatre and the historic town centre, makes the Butterfly Farm a natural addition to a day in this very popular tourist destination.

The Stratford-upon-Avon Canal is a historic waterway of approximately 25 miles running through the heart of Warwickshire and connecting the canal network at Kingswood Junction near Lapworth with the River Avon at Stratford-upon-Avon. Completed in 1816 after a construction programme that stretched over two decades, the canal was built primarily to carry coal from the Warwickshire coalfields southward and to enable the movement of agricultural produce and goods throughout a region that lacked good road connections. The canal fell into progressive disuse as road and rail transport developed through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and by the 1950s much of the southern section was completely impassable, its locks collapsed, its channel silted up and its infrastructure crumbling. The restoration of the Stratford Canal between 1960 and 1964, organised entirely by volunteers working under the aegis of the National Trust, was one of the pioneering examples of canal restoration in Britain and helped inspire the broader canal preservation movement that eventually rescued hundreds of miles of waterway across England and Wales. The engineering of the canal includes several features of particular interest. The Edstone Aqueduct near Bearley is at 475 feet the longest cast-iron aqueduct in England, carrying the canal across a shallow valley on a trough of cast iron that gives the extraordinary sensation of sailing across a field above the level of the surrounding landscape. The wharf-side buildings at Lapworth and several other locations retain authentic canal heritage character, and the distinctive barrel-roofed lock keeper's cottages that appear at intervals along the canal are some of the most photographed structures on the waterway network. Today the canal is primarily used by narrowboats and hire cruisers enjoying the peaceful countryside through which it passes, connecting the Shakespeare country of Warwickshire with the broader Midlands canal network. Walking and cycling the towpath provides an accessible and thoroughly pleasant way to experience the landscape along the canal's route.

Stratford-upon-Avon in Warwickshire is one of the most visited towns in England outside London, its fame resting entirely on its status as the birthplace of William Shakespeare, the greatest writer in the English language and the most performed playwright in the history of world theatre. The town has been attracting visitors in significant numbers since the eighteenth century, when the celebration of Shakespeare's genius first made his birthplace a destination of literary pilgrimage, and the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust now manages five houses associated with the playwright and his family. The Birthplace on Henley Street is the most visited of the Shakespeare properties, the medieval timber-framed house where William was born in April 1564 and where his father John Shakespeare pursued his trade as a glover and civic dignitary. The house was purchased by public subscription in 1847 and saved from demolition, an act of cultural preservation ahead of its time that established the model for the National Trust and the historic building preservation movement that followed. The interior has been furnished and interpreted to recreate the domestic environment of an Elizabethan tradesman's family of middling prosperity. Anne Hathaway's Cottage at Shottery, a short walk from the town centre, is the farmhouse where Shakespeare's wife grew up and is one of the finest surviving examples of a substantial English thatched farmhouse of the sixteenth century. Hall's Croft, the home of Shakespeare's daughter Susanna and her husband the physician John Hall, and Nash's House adjacent to the foundations of New Place, Shakespeare's final home that was demolished in the eighteenth century, complete the principal heritage properties. The Royal Shakespeare Company's theatres on the Avon provide world-class Shakespeare performance in the town throughout the year.

Warwick Castle is one of the finest and best-preserved medieval castles in England, a formidable fortress on a sandstone outcrop above the River Avon in the county town of Warwickshire that has been continuously developed and occupied from its foundation by William the Conqueror in 1068 to the present day. The combination of authentic medieval architecture, substantial surviving interiors and a comprehensive visitor experience that brings the castle's history to life through immersive displays and living history events makes it one of the most visited historic sites in the Midlands. The castle's military architecture is genuinely impressive. The curtain wall running between the great towers of Caesar's Tower and Guy's Tower encloses a substantial area of courtyard that gives an accurate impression of the scale of a major medieval fortress, and both towers survive to their original height, providing elevated viewpoints over the Avon and the surrounding town from their battlements. The great gatehouse and barbican form one of the most complete and best-preserved medieval entrance sequences in England, their layered defences of drawbridge, portcullis and gate towers illustrating the depth of thinking that went into denying entry to hostile forces. The castle's history is inseparable from that of the Earls of Warwick, whose family the Beauchamps acquired it in the early fourteenth century and developed it into the great fortress visible today. Richard Neville, the sixteenth-century Earl of Warwick known as the Kingmaker for his decisive role in the Wars of the Roses, was one of the most powerful subjects in England during the 1460s and his influence over the events leading to Edward IV's accession and then deposition gave the castle a brief moment of national political centrality. The Victorian apartments, developed by the Earls Brooke and Warwick in the nineteenth century, contain a distinguished collection of paintings, furniture and armour displayed within rooms furnished to a high standard that reflects the castle's continuing life as an aristocratic residence through that period.