North Yorkshire Moors

The landscape of this sparsely populated north-eastern corner of England is really distinctive. There are lovely village greens surrounded by red-roofed cottages of pale yellow stone, lying in long, quiet green valleys beneath the largest continuous area of heather moorland in the country.

The Cleveland Way takes in much of the best walking, with plenty of scope for striding out for miles over rolling moors, while the North Yorkshire Moors Railway provides an easier means of seeing the moor close up.

On the coast, Captain Cook's story is told at the fishing ports of Staithes and Whitby (his birthplace museum at Marton, on the edge of Middlesbrough, is well worth a look too), and Robin Hood's Bay is a captivating former smuggling village. The area's monastic ruins are justly famous, with Rievaulx Abbey staking a claim among the finest in Britain.