Places to explore near St Albans

Hertfordshire's grand circuit from the Royce Stone at Royston — chalk streams, commons and country houses for nearly 200 miles.

0.3 km SW · Hertfordshire

Long Norman abbey church over Roman Verulamium.

0.4 km SW

Historic city grown from the Roman town of Verulamium, its cathedral and medieval streets rising above the Ver and Verulamium Park.

0.4 km NE · Hertfordshire

Common-side dining pub on the edge of Harpenden.

6.7 km N

Deep wooded Iron Age earthwork on the edge of Wheathampstead, thought to be part of a stronghold of the Catuvellauni tribe.

7.1 km NE

London to Birmingham by water — the trunk route of the canal age, with arms reaching Leicester, Aylesbury, Northampton and Paddington.

8.2 km W · spans 9 counties

Beech woods and chalk downland within easy reach of London, laced with old ridge paths and grazing red kites

8.5 km NW

The Making of Harry Potter at Leavesden, a walk through the original film sets, props and Diagon Alley near Watford.

8.7 km SW

Jacobean palace of the Cecils and Elizabeth I.

9.5 km E

Secluded lane-end hamlet of George Bernard Shaw's home, a ruined old church and a Palladian eyecatcher church built as a folly.

10.8 km NE · Hertfordshire

Two vast airship hangars built for the R101 that still dominate the flat land south-east of Bedford, among the largest structures in the country.

15 km NW

A Gothic Victorian house reworked by the novelist Bulwer-Lytton, with Lutyens gardens.

15.1 km NE

A Humphry Repton landscape of lakes and meadows, home to an ancient Great Oak.

15.3 km E

A ten-acre garden planted between the wars in the outline of a cathedral, with grass avenues for nave and transepts and 'walls' of trees, a memorial to the fallen.

17.7 km NW

Beech woods and chalk downs on the Chilterns edge.

18.2 km W

A vast recumbent lion cut into Dunstable Downs in the early 1930s to mark the zoo below — big enough to see from the air.

18.3 km NW

Chalk escarpment with gliders and sweeping views.

18.4 km NW

Granite column of 1832 rising above the Ashridge beeches near Aldbury, climbable in summer for a thirty-mile view across the Chilterns.

18.6 km W

Chiltern-edge village with a duck pond, old stocks and whipping post on the green, timbered cottages climbing towards Ashridge woods.

18.7 km W · Hertfordshire

Rescued historic buildings re-erected across parkland near Chalfont St Giles, from an Iron Age house to Victorian farm and chapel.

19.1 km SW

Family wildlife park near Broxbourne with big cats and hundreds of exotic animals, voted a top county attraction.

19.4 km E

Old market town in the Misbourne valley with a broad high street of coaching inns, timbered houses and a 17th-century market hall below hilltop new Amersham.

20 km SW · Buckinghamshire

Bare chalk hilltop at the north-east end of the Ridgeway, an Iron Age hillfort with sweeping views over three counties.

20.9 km NW

Chilterns village round a green and pond, keeping Milton's Cottage where Paradise Lost was finished and neighbouring the Chiltern Open Air Museum.

20.9 km SW · Buckinghamshire

The largest shell grotto in the country, six flint-and-shell chambers dug into a Ware hillside by the poet John Scott in the 1760s.

21.9 km E

Walter Rothschild's own zoological museum in Tring, its Victorian galleries crammed with mounted animals from around the world.

22.6 km W

Nature reserve in a former chalk quarry near Pitstone, with wetland birds, chalk flowers and a lakeside visitor centre.

22.7 km W

The 2012 Olympic white-water course near Waltham Cross, open for rafting and kayaking over the rapids.

23.2 km E

A chalk hilltop of beech and ash woodland, crossed by the Icknield Way.

23.4 km N

An Edwardian pergola of stone columns and wisteria built for soap magnate Lord Leverhulme.

23.4 km SE

Four Victorian reservoirs built to feed the Grand Union Canal on the Chiltern edge near Tring, now a noted birdwatching reserve.

23.6 km W

A long-held family pub in a Chilterns village, The Good Pub Guide's Country Pub of the Year 2019.

23.6 km W

Quiet Misbourne village of old cottages and a manor, its flint church keeping medieval wall paintings, spared the through-traffic of its larger neighbour.

24 km W · Buckinghamshire

Norman church said to hold King Harold's grave.

24.2 km E

A Victorian burial ground of 1839 where Karl Marx and George Eliot lie.

24.6 km SE

High Chilterns village round a broad green with a cricket pitch and old church, often called one of England's most perfect villages.

24.8 km W · Buckinghamshire

Octagonal former dovecote beside Verulamium Park in St Albans, long cited among England's oldest pubs.

0.6 km SW

Flint-and-brick walls of Roman Verulamium, up to four metres high in places, in a park in St Albans.

1.3 km SW

Saxon-founded church over a thousand years old on the southern edge of St Albans, set in an acre of tree-filled churchyard.

1.3 km SW

Ruined porch, chapel and clock tower of Sir Nicholas Bacon's Elizabethan mansion near St Albans, built in the 1560s and later home to Francis Bacon.

3.6 km W

The Chiltern Society's grand loop through four counties of beechwood and chalk, grown from a Millennium project into 177 miles.

6.2 km NW · spans 5 counties

Down the Lea from its source at Leagrave to the Thames at Limehouse — flat towpath walking through Hertford and the Olympic Park.

7 km N · spans 4 counties

Grade II-listed country pub near Harpenden, settled into the Hertfordshire countryside since 1765.

8.4 km N