Things to find in United Kingdom
22 legends, 4 haunted places, 4 caves, 4 gem & mineral ground, 1 fossil ground on the free Club 49 adventure map
What the map holds here
- Avebury Legend
The largest megalithic stone circle in the world, and you can walk straight into it because there is a village inside. The henge is 347 metres across and over a kilometre round, with an outer circle 331.6 metres in diameter, and...
Open it on the map · Read the story - Blue John Cavern, Castleton Cave
A show cave in England’s Peak District that is also the only place in the world where Blue John is mined, a rare banded purple-and-yellow fluorite prized since Roman times for ornaments and vases. The cavern is a natural...
Open it on the map - Cairngorm smoky quartz Gem & mineral ground
The Cairngorm, a smoky-to-brown quartz from the granite of the Cairngorm Mountains, is Scotland’s national gemstone, set in the tops of the great dress-kilt brooches and the hilts of dirks. The Victorian “pebble hunters” scoured...
Open it on the map - Cheddar Gorge & the Mendip caves Cave
England’s deepest gorge, with Gough’s Cave at its foot where Britain’s oldest complete skeleton, Cheddar Man, was found, 10,000 years old, and where evidence of Ice Age cannibalism was later identified. The Mendip hills above are...
Open it on the map - Culloden Moor Haunted place
On this bleak moor near Inverness, in less than an hour on 16 April 1746, the last pitched battle on British soil destroyed the Jacobite cause and, with it, the old Highland way of life; some 1,500 clansmen fell and were buried...
Open it on the map - Fingal’s Cave Cave
A sea cave on the uninhabited island of Staffa, formed in the same hexagonal basalt columns as the Giant’s Causeway, so regular they look cut by hand. The sea booms and sings inside it, and that sound moved Mendelssohn to write...
Open it on the map - Glamis Castle Haunted place
The most famously haunted castle in Scotland, childhood home of the late Queen Mother and the setting Shakespeare gave Macbeth. Its legends are a whole shelf: a secret room walled up somewhere in the thickness of the walls, the...
Open it on the map - Kildonan gold (Baile an Or) Gem & mineral ground
In 1869 a Sutherland man back from the Australian diggings found gold in the Kildonan Burn, and a gold rush followed, hundreds of huts at a camp they called Baile an Or, “the town of gold.” It was brief, but the gold is still...
Open it on the map - Maeshowe Legend
A grass mound 35 metres across and 7.3 high on Orkney, raised about 2800 BC out of slabs weighing up to 30 tonnes, at a cost somebody has estimated at 39,000 to 100,000 hours of work. An eleven-metre passage runs in to a nearly...
Open it on the map · Read the story - Overtoun Bridge Legend
A three-arch bridge over the Overtoun Burn near Dumbarton, finished in June 1895 to a design by Henry Ernest Milner. Since the 1950s at least three hundred dogs have been recorded jumping off it and at least fifty have died on...
Open it on the map · Read the story - Rendlesham Forest Legend
On 26 and 28 December 1980, USAF personnel from RAF Woodbridge in Suffolk reported lights in the trees. Deputy base commander Lieutenant Colonel Charles Halt wrote an official memo describing a glowing metallic-looking object...
Open it on the map · Read the story - Rosslyn Chapel Legend
William Sinclair, 1st Earl of Caithness, broke ground on 20 September 1456 for a collegiate church, and what went up is one of the most densely carved buildings in Britain: over 110 Green Men, faces with foliage growing out of...
Open it on the map · Read the story - Scottish agates Gem & mineral ground
The old volcanic rocks of the Scottish coast and glens weather out agates the Victorians called “Scotch pebbles,” banded in red, blue and grey, and prized enough to floor a whole jewelry trade. The Usan and Ferryden shore near...
Open it on the map - Silbury Hill Legend
The largest artificial mound in prehistoric Europe: 39.3 metres high on a base 167 metres across, holding 248,000 cubic metres of material, raised between about 2400 and 2300 BC. The labour estimate is 18 million man-hours, which...
Open it on the map · Read the story - Smoo Cave Cave
A vast sea cave at Durness on the far north coast of Scotland, unusual for being cut by both the sea and a freshwater river, so you walk into an enormous outer chamber from the shore and then, inside, a waterfall pours from the...
Open it on the map - Sutton Hoo Legend
Not a hoard but a king’s ship-grave, and one of the greatest archaeological finds in Europe. In 1939, on the eve of war, a landowner asked an excavator to dig the largest of the mounds on her Suffolk estate, and under it lay the...
Open it on the map · Read the story - The Bell of King John / Loch Lomond Legend
Britain’s best-documented royal loss. In October 1216, King John of England lost his entire baggage train, the crown jewels of the Angevin kings among it, in the tidal quicksands of the Wash while fleeing across the estuary....
Open it on the map · Read the story - The Calanais Stones Legend
On a low ridge above Loch Roag on Lewis stands a cross-shaped setting: a circle of thirteen stones with a monolith 4.8 metres tall near the middle, shaped rather like a ship’s rudder, and five rows radiating out from it. Set up...
Open it on the map · Read the story - The Cuerdale Hoard Legend
The largest Viking silver hoard ever found in Britain, and one of the largest anywhere: in 1840 workmen repairing the bank of the River Ribble in Lancashire dug into a lead chest holding some 8,600 pieces of silver, coins and...
Open it on the map · Read the story - The Edinburgh Vaults Haunted place
Under the South Bridge in Edinburgh is a warren of stone vaults built into the arches in the 1780s for storage and workshops. They flooded, were abandoned, and became a slum and a haunt of the city’s underworld before being...
Open it on the map - The Flannan Isles lighthouse Legend
On 26 December 1900 the relief vessel Hesperus reached the light on Eilean Mòr, 32 km west of Lewis, and found nobody there. Three keepers, James Ducat, Thomas Marshall and Donald McArthur, were gone. The lamps were cleaned and...
Open it on the map · Read the story - The Galloway Hoard Legend
The richest Viking-age hoard ever found in Britain or Ireland. In 2014 a metal detectorist working a field near Balmaghie in Galloway, with permission, got a signal, and out of the ground came a buried world: silver arm-rings, a...
Open it on the map · Read the story - The Giant’s Causeway Legend
About forty thousand interlocking basalt columns stepping down into the sea in County Antrim, formed 50 to 60 million years ago when a lava flow cooled and contracted and cracked the way drying mud does, only in rock and on a...
Open it on the map · Read the story - The Hellfire Caves Legend
Francis Dashwood had these dug through the chalk between 1748 and 1752, nominally to supply material for a three-mile road to High Wycombe and really to give work to farm labourers ruined by drought and failed harvests. Then he...
Open it on the map · Read the story - The Jurassic Coast at Lyme Regis Fossil ground
Early Jurassic, ~200 mya
Open it on the map - The Lewis Chessmen Legend
In 1831, in a sandbank on the west coast of the Isle of Lewis, someone found a hoard of little figures carved from walrus ivory and whales’ teeth, an army of grave-faced kings, queens, bishops and berserkers biting their shields:...
Open it on the map · Read the story - The Loch Ness Monster Legend
The most famous lake legend on Earth. Reports of a creature in this long, deep, peat-dark Scottish loch go back to a tale of St. Columba in the 6th century, but the modern craze began in 1933 with a new lakeside road and a rush...
Open it on the map · Read the story - The Ring of Brodgar Legend
A stone circle 104 metres across on a narrow neck of land between two lochs on Orkney, put up between about 2500 and 2000 BC, the last of the great Neolithic monuments raised in an area that already had Skara Brae, Maeshowe and...
Open it on the map · Read the story - The Skaill Hoard Legend
The largest Viking silver hoard ever found in Scotland turned up in 1858 when a boy chasing a rabbit into its burrow on the Bay of Skaill in Orkney pulled out silver instead, more than eight kilos of arm-rings, brooches and...
Open it on the map · Read the story - The St Ninian’s Isle Treasure Legend
In 1958 a schoolboy helping on an archaeological dig on a tiny tidal island in Shetland lifted a stone slab in the floor of an old chapel and found a larch box holding 28 pieces of Pictish silver, brooches, bowls and a...
Open it on the map · Read the story - The Staffordshire Hoard Legend
The largest hoard of Anglo-Saxon gold and silver ever found. In 2009 a man with a metal detector, working a field near Lichfield in England with permission, uncovered more than 4,000 pieces, almost all of it war-gear, sword...
Open it on the map · Read the story - The Tower of London Haunted place
Nearly a thousand years of imprisonment, torture and execution have left the Tower the most famously haunted building in England: Anne Boleyn walking headless, the two little princes who vanished in 1483, the shade of Lady Jane...
Open it on the map - The green children of Woolpit Legend
Some time in the reign of King Stephen, so between 1135 and 1154, two children were found by the wolf pits at Woolpit in Suffolk. Their skin was green. They spoke no English, would eat nothing but raw broad beans at first, and...
Open it on the map · Read the story - Wanlockhead & Leadhills gold Gem & mineral ground
Scotland’s goldfield. The Lowther Hills around Wanlockhead (the highest village in Scotland) and Leadhills have given up gold for five centuries, and the gold in the Honours of Scotland, the oldest crown jewels in Britain, came...
Open it on the map - Whitechapel, 1888 Legend
Between 3 April 1888 and 13 February 1891 eleven women were murdered in the East End of London in the file the police kept as the Whitechapel murders. Five of them, Mary Ann Nichols, Annie Chapman, Elizabeth Stride, Catherine...
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Every one of these is sourced
Each entry links to the record it came from. Access rules, permits and land status vary by country and are noted where the source states them, check locally before you go.
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