Deep time & grandeur: 6 days, Stonehenge, Bath & the Jurassic Coast

Brasserie at the Covent Garden hotel, London

Arrive at 3pm in the afternoon to check-in to our hotel, located in one of London’s most celebrated neighbourhoods. Choose to take it easy, wander around Covent Garden, or St James’s Park (the Oldest Royal Park) and Piccadilly areas, in the heart of ceremonial London.

Trafalgar Square with Big Ben in the distance

• Hotel: Overnight in Covent Garden Hotel, central London. Think design-led, super cool and bursting with delightful details
• Free evening

Stonehenge, Wiltshire

Your GeoCultura guide will meet you after breakfast and we will set off for our first UNESCO site of the tour by road. Part of the Stonehenge and Avebury World Heritage Site, Stonehenge is one of the world’s most iconic stone circles. As you walk its circumference, it’s surprisingly easy to imagine our ancestors hauling these vast stones into position and living out their lives across the protected rolling plains that still surround Stonehenge. You can even step inside their homes at a recreation of a Neolithic village at the visitor centre. 

We also visit Lacock, a quintessentially English village with an 800-year-old abbey guarding its secret treasures. 

When we arrive in Bath, take a moment to relax and enjoy your hotel – a lively place with a quiet courtyard garden close to the famous Bath Assembly Rooms – then spend the rest of the afternoon and evening exploring Bath’s honey-hued streets. Where and when you go is up to you. 

• Hotel: Overnight at The Queensberry, a four-star boutique hotel in an 18th-century townhouse. This desirable establishment blends noble Georgian décor with 21st-century trappings
• Group dinner in an acclaimed independent restaurant nearby

The ancient Roman baths, Bath

After breakfast, we tour the World Heritage Site of the City of Bath, including the Roman Baths in the morning, and after lunch, the best of Georgian Bath. You’ll see some of the most famous architecture of this majestic city, including the Royal Crescent, the Circus and the unmissable Bath Abbey. You’ll also hear the surprisingly human-centred story behind the characteristic, buff-coloured Bath Stone that defines the city. 

The Royal Crescent

If you prefer, you can skip the tour to browse Bath’s many historical buildings, independent shops – the shopping here is top notch – or visit your choice of museum, gallery or artist studio. Many of these places are no more than a 10- or 15-minute walk from The Queensbury Hotel. Seren, your guide for these first few days, is happy to make suggestions based on your interests.

• Hotel: The Queensberry, Bath
• Free evening

Wells Cathedral chained library

After breakfast, we travel to the little city of Wells in the bucolic county of Somerset. Its cathedral is described as “unquestionably one of the most beautiful” and “most poetic” of English Gothic cathedrals. It’s also home to one of the few chained libraries in Britain. This remarkable library is filled with books published before 1800 and accessed by a stone spiral staircase. 

We then head to Lyme Regis, Dorset. This historic seaside town has been the setting for many famous films, novels, and TV dramas, from Jane Austen’s novel Persuasion to 2023’s blockbuster Wonka starring Timothée Chalamet.  

If you feel like getting hands-on with history, the tide will be right for an exclusive guided fossil hunt on the beach. You can choose to learn to hunt fossils, and see the famous Blue Lias rocks, with their distinct limestone bands alternating with blue-black clays formed in deep time, 200 million years ago. 

Mary Anning Statue

In the town centre, your guide talks you through the extraordinary life of Mary Anning, discoverer of dinosaur fossils and subject of the film Ammonite starring Kate Winslet. Then, take a stroll along The Cobb, Lyme Regis’s striking harbour wal.l that has inspired everyone from Jane Austen to Meryl Streep in The French Lieutenant’s Woman. 

• Hotel: Check-in to Mortons Manor, Corfe Castle village, for two nights
• Group dinner

Durdle Door, Dorset

Start the day in the charming village of Abbotsbury. We’ll walk half a mile to take in sweeping views of vast Chesil Beach and see the medieval chapel of St Catherine’s. 

Chesil Beach is some 18 miles (29 km) long, running all the way from Portland to West Bay. It is the location of a large Iron Age Fort and the beautiful backdrop for many films, including The Dam Busters and On Chesil Beach. 

Lulworth Cove

We then drive east along the coast to see the iconic Durdle Door rock arch and take a short walk around Stair Hole. Our final stop is Lulworth Cove, as picturesque as it is dramatic.

• Hotel: Mortons Manor, Corfe Castle village, Dorset.
• Free evening

Corfe Castle

Start your last day of the tour with a private guided walk around Corfe Castle and the village at its feet. Built by William the Conqueror, Corfe was one of the first castles in England to be built from stone. It’s positioned to defend one of the few gaps in the steep-sided Purbeck ridge, which extends across Dorset. However, it was civil war not invasion, that ultimately destroyed Corfe Castle, after its owners, the Bankes family, backed King Charles I over Parliament; it was blown apart in 1646. But this wasn’t the end of the Bankes’ fine fortunes, as you’ll discover later today.  

Etches Collection Museum

Then, we’ll make the short journey to Kingston Church, nicknamed ‘the Cathedral of Purbeck’. According to poet John Betjeman, it “gleams with Purbeck marble”. From there, we’ll visit the Etches Collection museum, which houses the spectacular fossil skull of a pliosaur, carefully extracted from the cliffs above Kimmeridge Bay in 2023. If the weather is fine, there may be time for a walk to see Old Harry’s Rocks or some famous dinosaur footprints. 

After a traditional pub lunch, we’ll head to Kingston Lacy, a fine house which was the Bankes family’s grand Dorset home – given to them when the monarchy was restored – and later remodelled in Italianate style to resemble a Venetian palace.   

The tour ends around 5pm when the group will be dropped at Wareham station to catch a direct train back to London Waterloo station, to arrive around 7:30pm.

Note: If required for reasons beyond our control, GeoCultura reserves the right to substitute alternative accommodation of equal or higher quality or adapt the itinerary if required.