Huntingdon Castle Hills

The mounds rising from the flat Cambridgeshire landscape near Huntingdon are what's left of a Norman castle - two substantial earthwork hills that once supported a fortification. What you see now are the defensive ditches and ramparts, stripped of their timber or stone structures centuries ago, but still commanding enough to give you a real sense of medieval military thinking.

It's a straightforward spot. You can walk around the mounds, poke about the ditches, and get a decent view across the surrounding countryside if you clamber to the top. History types will find it interesting - it's genuine 11th-century defensive architecture, even if time and weather have done their work. Kids might manage twenty minutes of scrambling about before losing interest, unless they're the sort who get genuinely excited by ramparts and moats.

There's no visitor facility, no café, no interpretive boards worth writing home about. This is rough ground archaeology, really - the kind of thing you add to a walk rather than make a special trip for on its own. That said, if you're staying at Huntingdon Boathaven or any of the nearby parks - Wyton Lakes is barely two miles away - it's worth half an hour of your morning as a diversion. The walk from the town centre is reasonable enough.

Best visited on foot as part of a broader ramble around Huntingdon rather than as a destination in itself. Spring and autumn work well - summer can be overgrown, winter's muddy.