UK tourist attractions

Got a taste for blue blood? With its yew hedge maze and restored State Apartments, Henry VIII’s extravagant Thames-side Hampton Court Palace is the most revered of England’s royal abodes. Built in 1516, the gardens were laid out in the seventeenth century, modelled on those at Versailles. It’s worth taking a day to fully explore - Hampton Court is huge - but the most rewarding sections are: Henry VIII’s Apartments, William III’s Apartments, Henry VIII’s Kitchens and the Cumberland Art Gallery. Mad for ruffles? Book a guided tour - led by a period-costumed historian - to bring the place to life.

For a Welsh gift to UK sightseeing, make for the Gower Peninsula, just a short drive from Swansea. This is a stunning stretch, fringed by glorious bays and dramatic cliffs, and dotted with prehistoric remains and castle ruins. Watersports are king here, and you can try your hand at surfing, sea kayaking and coasteering.

The British Museum is one of the great museums of the world. With more than seventy thousand exhibits arranged over several miles of galleries, it holds a huge collection of antiquities, prints and drawings. Its assortment of Roman and Greek art is unrivalled, its Egyptian collection is the best outside Egypt and there are fabulous treasures from Anglo-Saxon and Roman Britain - and from China, Japan, India and Mesopotamia.

England’s largest national park, the Lake District, is also one of its favourites - and ours too, by the way. With sixteen lakes, scores of mountains and strong literary connections, what’s not to love? The almost alpine landscape is characterised by glistening water, dramatic valleys and picturesque stone-built villages. Given a week you could easily see most of the famous settlements and lakes on a circuit taking in Windermere, Coniston, Keswick and Ullswater.

It would be criminal to make a list of UK attractions and not include the Giant’s Causeway. Northern Ireland’s first UNESCO World Heritage Site, the Causeway is an astonishing assembly of more than 40,000 basalt columns, formed into packed hexagonal shapes by the cooling of molten lava. Its existence wasn’t even known about until the Bishop of Derry stumbled upon it in 1692!

An ancient - still unexplained - ring of monoliths, Stonehenge attracts sun-worshippers in their thousands over the summer solstice. No such structure arouses more controversy, as archaeologists argue over its purpose, and guardians struggle to manage its enormous visitor numbers.

It’s a genuine thrill to watch Shakespeare performed in this reconstruction of the famous Elizabethan theatre. Shakespeare’s Globe has the first new thatched roof in central London since the Great Fire of 1666 - and the first candlelit indoor theatre since the advent of electricity.

Pride of Cornwall, the Eden Project showcases the diversity of the planet’s plant life in an imaginative way. Centre-stage are the ‘biomes’ - vast conservatories made up of hexagonal panels that look like giant golf balls. One holds groves of olive and citrus trees, cacti and other plants usually found in the warm, temperate zones of the Med, southern Africa and southwestern USA. The larger one contains plants from the tropics, with a waterfall and river gushing through.

One of the world’s great arts festivals - in fact, several festivals - transforms the handsome old city of Edinburgh each year into a swirling cultural maelstrom. The principal events are the Edinburgh International Festival and the much larger Edinburgh Festival Fringe, with a diverse range of theatre, comedy, dance and music on show. The latter sees more than fifty thousand performances of more than three thousand shows, in almost three hundred venues, with performers - and audiences - hailing from every corner of the globe. Keep calm and carry on cheering. Looking for UK holiday packages? There’s plenty of fantastic options to choose from.