England

England is a country that has been lived in so continuously, for so long, that layers of history lie just beneath every surface. The Romans built the first London Bridge; the Normans raised the Tower; the Victorians laid the railways that connect the whole improbable enterprise together. Yet the England that most visitors fall in love with is not the England of grand monuments — it is the England of country lanes, village cricket, cathedral cities heavy with evensong, and coastal paths above chalk cliffs where the light in late summer does something that painters have been trying to capture for centuries. A week here barely scratches the surface; a fortnight begins to suggest the whole.

The Cotswolds: England at Its Most Unchanged

The Cotswolds Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty covers 800 square miles of limestone upland between Oxford and Bath, dotted with villages of honey-coloured stone that appear to have been arranged by someone with an unusually refined sense of composition. Bourton-on-the-Water, Bibury, and Burford are the most celebrated and the most visited; for a quieter experience, Chipping Campden, Winchcombe, and the villages of the Slaughters reward an afternoon's purposeful wandering. The Cotswold Way, a 102-mile National Trail from Chipping Campden to Bath, provides the finest overview of the region on foot. Manor house hotels scattered across the area — Barnsley House, The Wild Rabbit, Lords of the Manor — bring contemporary luxury to buildings that have been standing for four hundred years.

• Blenheim Palace: Winston Churchill's birthplace and one of England's grandest baroque houses, set in a Capability Brown landscape
• Oxford: The Bodleian Library, Christ Church Meadow, punting on the Cherwell — and the best collection of college dining rooms in England
• Bath: The Roman Baths, the Royal Crescent, and Sally Lunn's buns — a Georgian city of complete architectural coherence

Stonehenge and the Ancient South

Wiltshire's chalk downland contains the greatest concentration of prehistoric monuments in Europe. Stonehenge, begun around 3000 BC and still not fully understood, commands the plain with a combination of physical presence and unanswerable mystery that no amount of familiarity can entirely diminish. Avebury, ten miles north, is larger and less visited — a stone circle that encloses an entire village, with an associated museum that provides the best available context for the monuments. The long barrows of the Ridgeway, England's oldest road, run east through Wiltshire and Berkshire; walking any section of it is to travel through a landscape where the Bronze Age and the twenty-first century exist in unhurried proximity.

The Lake District

England's most celebrated landscape is also its most rewarding for serious walkers. The Lake District National Park covers 912 square miles of mountains, valleys, and lakes in Cumbria, and contains all twenty of England's peaks above 3,000 feet. Scafell Pike, the highest, can be climbed in a long day from Wasdale; Helvellyn via Striding Edge provides arguably the finest ridge walk in England. Windermere, Coniston Water, and Ullswater offer the gentler pleasures of lake cruising and shore-path walking. The area's hotel culture is surprisingly sophisticated: Gilpin Hotel near Windermere and The Samling above the lake are among the finest rural retreats in England, combining exceptional food with landscapes that Wordsworth described better than anyone since.

• York: The Minster, the Shambles, and the National Railway Museum — one of England's finest medieval cities
• Cornwall: Padstow for Rick Stein's restaurants; St Ives for the Tate gallery and surf beaches; the Minack Theatre cut into coastal cliffs
• Cambridge: The Backs, King's College Chapel, and punting on the Cam — a gentler, flatter, and often overlooked counterpart to Oxford

Planning an England Journey

England's rail network, though imperfect, connects the major cities with reasonable efficiency — London to Bath takes 90 minutes; to Oxford, 55 minutes; to York, two hours. A hire car becomes essential for the Cotswolds, the Lake District, and anywhere that requires freedom to follow smaller roads at will. The country's network of public footpaths — over 100,000 miles of legally protected rights of way — means that even the most densely farmed landscape can be explored on foot. April through September offers the best weather and the longest days; June for the Chelsea Flower Show, July for Glyndebourne and Wimbledon, August for the Edinburgh Fringe if Scotland is part of the itinerary.