“Those stones, standing in their rough circle on a rise on Salisbury Plain, are as special now as they have been for countless generations. One of my favourite little details is the graffiti left on the stones by subsequent generations, a long time after its creators but still a long time before us. Someone carved hand axes in the stones during the Bronze Age, and Christopher Wren gouged out his name during the 17th century.”

“History has happened here time and again, like snow falling on snow. A tribe could shelter behind the Iron Age fortifications, looking out for a hostile army from every direction for at least half a day’s march. Inside the huge ramparts, the Roman settlement has largely vanished. Sadly little remains of the huge medieval castle, but the setting and the chronological range of this site, not to mention the spray of wildflowers that carpet it, make it magical.”

“The outer walls of Pevensey are Roman, built as part of a vast defensive network to try and protect the vulnerable, sprawling coastlines of their northern European empire. When William the Conqueror landed in 1066, he used these crumbling walls as a sanctuary and strengthened them with a castle he had brought over with him. Today’s stone castle dates from a little later, but Pevensey continued to lie at the heart of Norman England’s story.”

“[This is the site of] a truly decisive battle fought in the most famous year in England’s history. I have been here so often—on school trips, family holidays, filming days—yet there is always something new to notice and explore. It was here that the last Anglo-Saxon king of England was slaughtered, alongside two of his brothers and the flower of England’s elite. William conquered and England would never be the same.”

“It is not surprising that at the closest point of our island to the continent, generation after generation have made their mark. [This site has been] an Iron Age fort, Roman and Anglo-Saxon settlements, a gigantic medieval royal fortress, and endless tunnels, barracks, and operations rooms. You need days to get round Dover Castle. The WWII tunnels are worthy of a visit in their own right, even if you ignore the splendour of the Plantagenet turrets and walls soaring above.”

“Kings won their crowns and lost them at Kenilworth. It was one of the most powerful fortresses in Europe, with moats and artificial lakes surrounding it like some mythical stronghold. That sense of magic was deepened by one particular owner, Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester. He was a favourite of Queen Elizabeth, and he threw one of history’s most lavish parties to impress her. The extravagant consumption, fireworks and dancing lasted for days, while the debts haunted his successors.”

“At Boscobel, history came once, but we still talk about it nearly four centuries later. The handsome house must have been a welcome sight to young fugitive prince Charles Stuart, who had lost his attempt to regain the throne of his father. He came to Boscobel, and they recommended he hide in an oak tree 100 metres from the house. He clung to the branches as his pursuers searched the forest floor below. When he returned to Britain as Charles II, the ‘Royal Oak’ became a symbol of his salvation.”

“To a lover of history, Ironbridge is a piece of heritage on par with anything from our past. This is the birthplace of the industrial revolution, a place where innovators burnt coke to heat and work iron. This lush valley was a place of desolation in the 1770s. To facilitate the transport of people and the goods they made from one side to the other, they built a bridge, not of stone but of iron, the new wonder material with which they would refashion the globe.”

“This is what towns and cities used to look like. Narrow, anarchic streets with wood-built dwellings squeezing out the sky. Modernists swept thousands of these streets away, rendering cities fit for the automotive revolution. But in a few places, like York, that world survived: the intimacy, the claustrophobia, the strange beauty, the threat. When the Black Death arrived in York, it found the perfect vector in streets like the Shambles, spreading a disease that would kill up to half the city.”

“Just as the Romans had monitored foreign incursions from their bases at places like Pevensey, so the Cold War government built a network of bunkers to warn of Soviet nuclear strike. By the time the bunkers were built, they were almost obsolete, terribly vulnerable to the massive hydrogen bombs with which the Soviet arsenal bristled. This bunker is a time capsule, saved for posterity. A glimpse of life from a chapter of our history that we hoped, naïvely, had closed.”