A deep, bell-shaped, man-made chalk cave beneath the streets of Royston, believed to date from the 13th Century. It was deliberately sealed and forgotten until its accidental re-discovery. Its long concealment may have a lot to do with the bizarre Christian and pre-Christian imagery carved into the chalk walls - Sheela-na-gigs and Saint Catherine, the Holy Family (or are they?), knights, martyrs, magical creatures. They form a sort of frenzied panorama, their stories linked in ways that modern eyes can no longer see. The cave itself has sinister dells and niches and platforms. Royston was a town of the Knights Templar - it is also the place where Ermine Street and the Icknield Way intersect.

www.roystoncave.co.uk
Melbourn Street, Royston, Hertfordshire, SG8 7BZ
+44(0)1763 245484
Google map: bit.ly/qJlfZa

I agreeI disagree

1.  
2. Send to friends

The most evocative ruin in England - an almost complete shell, with shadowed corridors, grand sweeps of stone staircases, guarderobes, a fireplace eerily suspended in the wall of a collapsed Great Hall, a chapel alter, and an exquisite, intact white chamber. This was the prison of the She-Wolf of France, Isabella, confined by her son for conspiring to murder her husband, Edward II. Let your children pelt up and down the vast surrounding earthwork, and dart past the grooves where the old portcullis fell.

Castle Rising, Kings Lynn, Norfolk, PE31 6AH
+44(0)1553 631330
www.castlerising.co.uk/
Google map: bit.ly/eTfLjT

I agreeI disagree

1.  
2. Send to friends