Grantchester Meadows

The meadows stretch out flat and proper green, about a twenty-minute walk south from Cambridge city centre. You're looking at open grassland that floods in winter and comes alive with wildflowers come spring - fritillaries, ragged robins, the lot. It's the sort of place where you actually see what the Fens must have looked like before drainage and farming took over.

Walkers absolutely get the most from this. The River Cam runs alongside, and you can follow it for miles without any real obstacles. Birdwatchers should bring binoculars - water voles, kingfishers, and various raptors turn up regularly. In summer it's packed with families, though the grass gets churned up something fierce by July. If you time it right - say late April or May - it's genuinely lovely.

Free to roam, no entrance fee, no restrictions on hours that I could find. Allow anything from forty minutes for a quick loop to three hours if you're serious about the river walk and actually stopping to notice things. The camping sites around Cambridge (the Camping Club site is closest at under two miles) make sensible bases for exploring the Cambridgeshire waterways properly. Grantchester Meadows isn't spectacle - no views, no monuments. It's quietness and space and the chance to see the landscape doing its own thing, which is precisely why it's worth the detour from the punts and college courtyards.