Attraction in Cambridgeshire

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.