Tourist attractions Peterborough

Peterborough and Ely were the two great monasteries on the Fens. The Saxon monastery built before the Norman conquest in around 655 was destroyed by the Danes in 870. A second Saxon church, built in the 10C as a Benedictine abbey, was destroyed by fi..

Marshland surrounded by an industrial zone are the site for digs that have revealed remains more than 3,000 years old. The little museum in the visitor centre has a wonderful exhibition of bronze spears, harnesses, bracelets and pots.

One of the finest Elizabethan manors, built by William Cecil, Lord Burghley, "the greatest, gravest and most esteemed Councillor that ever your Majesty had", as Essex confided to Elizabeth I. The extensive 17C redecoration includes the pain..

Steam locomotives puff along the Nene Valley and through a long tunnel. The carriages are fitted out with wooden fascia and the smoke billows over the flat landscape as in times gone by. The museum at Wansford displays one carriage with railway mem..

Rebuilt in around 1480, St Martin's is built entirely in Perpendicular style. The north chapel is dominated by an imposing alabaster monument to William Cecil, Lord Burghley (1520-1598).

These charming late-Elizabethan almshouses were built on the site of the medieval hospital of St John the Baptist and St Thomas the Martyr in 1597.

Built in around 1475, Brownes hospital had cubicles for "10 poor men" in what is now the Board Room. The chapel and audit room are both lit by memorable stained-glass windows dating from c 1480.

The 14C gate, which was rebuilt here c 1688, was originally part of Brazenose College, no longer standing, established in 1333 by students seceding from Brazenose College in Oxford.

The story of Stamford embraces its Saxon origins up to its starring role in a BBC television serial, Middlemarch , an adaptation of the novel of the same name by George Eliot. In a more macabre vein are the life-sized wax models of Daniel Lambert, t..