Villages & towns

Weavers' cottages Morris called England's loveliest.

Gloucestershire

National Trust-owned village of timbered and stone cottages with a medieval abbey and barn, kept free of modern clutter and much used on screen.

Wiltshire

Honey-stone Cotswold village around a medieval market cross and packhorse bridge, often called England's prettiest and a favourite film location.

Wiltshire

Georgian china-clay port near St Austell, its unchanged harbour often lined with tall ships and used as a period film set.

Cornwall

Roman walled city on the Dee whose two-tier medieval Rows, black-and-white shopfronts and cathedral make it one of England's best-preserved historic centres.

Cheshire

Privately owned fishing village where a cobbled street too steep for cars tumbles between whitewashed cottages to a stone harbour.

Devon

Village at the head of Loch Shiel, famed for its Jacobite monument and the arched Glenfinnan Viaduct.

Highland

Wordsworth's beloved village beside its lake, home to Dove Cottage, St Oswald's churchyard and the gingerbread shop by the church gate.

Cumbria

A steep, pretty seaside town on the Devon border, its curving Cobb harbour and blue-clay cliffs the cradle of British fossil-hunting.

Dorset

Harbour village at the foot of a wooded gorge where the East and West Lyn rivers meet the sea below towering Exmoor cliffs.

Devon

Restored 18th-century cotton-mill village on the Clyde, a UNESCO World Heritage Site of pioneering social reform.

South Lanarkshire

Bustling Camel-estuary harbour town, famous for its fishing quay, Obby Oss festival and a clutch of Rick Stein restaurants.

Cornwall

Sheltered Loch Carron village famous for its palm trees, harbour and TV role in Hamish Macbeth.

Highland

A smugglers' village of cobbled alleys tumbling down a ravine to a rocky, fossil-strewn shore.

North Yorkshire

Hilltop citadel above the Rother marshes, its cobbled Mermaid Street climbing past timbered houses, antique shops and a Norman church.

East Sussex

Titus Salt's model mill village of 1851 on the Aire, a UNESCO World Heritage Site with Salts Mill's Hockney galleries.

West Yorkshire

A hilltop Saxon town famous for Gold Hill, a steep cobbled lane of thatched cottages falling away over the Blackmore Vale.

Dorset

Scotland's oldest university town and the worldwide home of golf, with two sandy beaches and a ruined cathedral and castle.

Fife

Light-filled seaside town of galleries and white-sand beaches, home to Tate St Ives above its old fishing harbour.

Cornwall

Walled Victorian seaside resort with pastel harbour houses, three sandy beaches and views to Caldey Island.

Pembrokeshire

A cliff-hung harbour town of red roofs and kipper smoke, the 199 steps climbing to abbey and clifftop church.

North Yorkshire

England's great walled cathedral city, the Minster rising over the timbered lean of the Shambles and a two-mile rampart above the Ouse.

North Yorkshire

The most easterly and most photographed East Neuk fishing village, its tiny harbour ringed by pantiled cottages.

Fife

The gritstone 'plague village' that quarantined itself in 1665-66, its cottages still marked with the names of the dead.

Derbyshire

Picture-postcard conservation village of estate cottages on Loch Lomond's west shore.

Argyll and Bute

The bustling capital of the East Neuk, home to the Scottish Fisheries Museum, a famous fish bar and ferries to the Isle of May.

Fife

Windrush-side village where low stone bridges step across the river through a long green, earning it the tag 'Venice of the Cotswolds'.

Gloucestershire

The cradle of the factory system, where Richard Arkwright built the world's first water-powered cotton mill in 1771.

Derbyshire

One of the best-preserved 16th-17th century burghs in Scotland, its white-harled houses and cobbled lanes a favourite Outlander filming location.

Fife

Steep cobbled Main Street climbing to the parsonage where the Brontes wrote, the moors of Wuthering Heights beginning at the top.

West Yorkshire

England's best-preserved medieval wool town, a tilting crush of timber-framed houses round a Tudor guildhall and one of the country's grandest parish churches.

Suffolk

Faded-then-reviving bay resort with a five-mile prom, the Eric Morecambe statue and the art-deco Midland Hotel.

Lancashire

Granite fishing village on Mount's Bay whose tiny harbour, wrapped by a curving stone breakwater, glows with lights each Christmas.

Cornwall

Old smuggling village packed into a steep ravine, its whitewashed cottages and car-free lanes clustered around a small tidal harbour.

Cornwall

A former fishing port squeezed into a cleft between high cliffs, its cottages painted and Cook once apprenticed here.

North Yorkshire

Mull's main town, famous for its curved row of brightly painted harbour-front houses.

Argyll and Bute

Remote tarn-side hamlet reached by a single lane and a packhorse bridge, National Trust-owned in a hanging valley above Borrowdale.

Cumbria

Working harbour town with crab boats at the quay, a Georgian green and a beach of huts and pinewoods a mile north

Norfolk

Green-hearted Dartmoor village under bare tors, its granite church tower earning it the name Cathedral of the Moor.

Devon

A honey-stone and thatch village near Chesil Beach, strung along one street below its hilltop chapel, swannery and subtropical gardens.

Dorset

Fishing village at the tip of the Llŷn, the last stop for pilgrims crossing to Bardsey Island, with a mile-long sandy bay.

Gwynedd

A shingle-beach town of pastel houses and fishermen's huts selling fresh fish, home to the Britten festival and Maggi Hambling's Scallop.

Suffolk

Leafy conservation village on the southern edge of Ayr, birthplace of Robert Burns and the heart of Burns country.

South Ayrshire

Handsome market town of limestone townhouses gathered below a great castle, with a famous garden and a bookshop in the old station.

Northumberland

Slate-built town at the head of Windermere, its narrow streets full of outdoor shops, cafes and the tiny Bridge House straddling Stock Beck.

Cumbria

A market town under a great castle and cathedral, tucked into a bend of the Arun with tea rooms and antique shops.

West Sussex

Historic market town in the National Forest, its Tudor castle ruins immortalised in Scott's Ivanhoe.

Leicestershire

Medway village of a medieval ragstone bridge, a working friary and old timbered houses.

Kent