Whitby Abbey

Can you imagine contemporary culture without the idea of a brooding, blood-sucking vampire? We have Bram Stoker's 19th century novel Dracula, which is set near the brooding ruins of Whitby Abbey, to thank.

Stoker was on holiday in Whitby when he read about Vlad the Impaler - a 15th century prince (nicknamed 'Dracula') with a taste for cruelty. Inspired by this and by the rugged landscape around him, Stoker set much of his gothic tale in the Yorkshire town.

In the novel, Dracula travels to England from rural Transylvania. One stormy night, a Russian ship runs aground off Whitby after its crew mysteriously vanish. The only survivor is a large dog, which runs up the steps from the sea to the abbey. The dog is Dracula in disguise - and his reign of terror begins.

Whitby Abbey can also lay claim to being the home of the first named English poet, Caedmon. He lived there shortly after its foundation in the 7th century.

Hadrian's Wall

The former frontier of the Roman Empire has inspired bestselling writers for centuries. Perhaps the best known recent example is George RR Martin, who has said that the huge ice wall in A Game of Thrones (1996) was inspired by a 1981 visit to Hadrian's Wall.

Hadrian's Wall itself features in plenty of other stories. Rosemary Sutcliff's The Eagle of the Ninth (1954) tells the story of a Roman called Marcus and his slave, Esca. They are on a quest beyond the safety of Hadrian's Wall to find out what happened to Marcus' father, who disappeared - along with 4,000 men of the Ninth Legion.

Sutcliff paints a vivid picture of the wall: 'a great gash of stonework, still raw with newness. Eighty miles of fortresses, mile-castles, watch-towers, strung on one great curtain wall […]This was the great Wall of Hadrian, shutting out the menace of the north.'

Poet WH Auden imagined a bleak life on the wall for Roman soldiers. In Roman Wall Blues (1937) his soldier complains: 'Over the heather the wet wind blows,/ I've lice in my tunic and a cold in my nose./ The rain comes pattering out of the sky,/ I'm a Wall soldier, and I don't know why.'

Home of Charles Darwin, Down House

Charles Darwin wrote one of the most famous books in history from Down House in Kent. On the Origin of Species (1859) set out his theory of evolution and changed the way we think about the world forever.

Today you can stand in the very study where Darwin wrote the book. The room still has Darwin's original furniture, specimens and scientific instruments. As Darwin's son Francis recalled, it has a 'general air of simpleness, makeshift, & general oddness'. It's the perfect place to get an insight into the mind of one of history's most brilliant scientists.

Warkworth Castle

Several scenes of William Shakespeare's Henry IV are set at Warkworth Castle, the stronghold of the powerful Percy family. Memorably, he describes the castle as '… this worm-eaten hold of ragged stone'.

By the 18th century the Warkworth's ruins were starting to attract tourists, especially after the publication of Bishop Percy's 1771 poem, The Hermit of Warkworth:

Nor far from hence, where yon full stream
Runs winding down the lea,
Fair WARKWORTH lifts her lofty towers,
And overlooks the sea.

Those towers, alas! now lie forlorn,
With noisome weeds o'erspred,
Where feasted lords and courtly dames,
And where the poor were fed.

Orford Castle

In the late 12th century the fishermen of Orford, Suffolk, caught a merman in their nets. According to the 13th century chronicler Ralph of Coggeshall, 'He was naked and was like a man in all his members, covered with hair and with a long shaggy beard.' He was taken to Orford Castle and imprisoned there, but 'he would not talk, even when tortured and hung up by his feet'. He was allowed into the sea to swim, and eventually managed to escape.

Former Poet Laureate Andrew Motion grew up near Orford, and wrote about the treatment of the merman in his poem Salt Water (1997):

'They wound a rope around his net / And dragged him through the square, /Up the looming castle keep, /Then down the castle stair / And down and down and down and down through wet-root-smelling air / Into a room more cave than room / And hung him there.'