Things to find in United Kingdom

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• Blue John Cavern, Castleton Cave
  A show cave in England’s Peak District that is also the only place in the world where Blue John is mined, a rare banded purple-and-yellow fluorite prized since Roman times for ornaments and vases. The cavern is a natural...
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• Cairngorm smoky quartz Gem & mineral ground
  The Cairngorm, a smoky-to-brown quartz from the granite of the Cairngorm Mountains, is Scotland’s national gemstone, set in the tops of the great dress-kilt brooches and the hilts of dirks. The Victorian “pebble hunters” scoured...
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• Cheddar Gorge & the Mendip caves Cave
  England’s deepest gorge, with Gough’s Cave at its foot where Britain’s oldest complete skeleton, Cheddar Man, was found, 10,000 years old, and where evidence of Ice Age cannibalism was later identified. The Mendip hills above are...
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• Culloden Moor Haunted place
  On this bleak moor near Inverness, in less than an hour on 16 April 1746, the last pitched battle on British soil destroyed the Jacobite cause and, with it, the old Highland way of life; some 1,500 clansmen fell and were buried...
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• Fingal’s Cave Cave
  A sea cave on the uninhabited island of Staffa, formed in the same hexagonal basalt columns as the Giant’s Causeway, so regular they look cut by hand. The sea booms and sings inside it, and that sound moved Mendelssohn to write...
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• Glamis Castle Haunted place
  The most famously haunted castle in Scotland, childhood home of the late Queen Mother and the setting Shakespeare gave Macbeth. Its legends are a whole shelf: a secret room walled up somewhere in the thickness of the walls, the...
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• Kildonan gold (Baile an Or) Gem & mineral ground
  In 1869 a Sutherland man back from the Australian diggings found gold in the Kildonan Burn, and a gold rush followed, hundreds of huts at a camp they called Baile an Or, “the town of gold.” It was brief, but the gold is still...
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• Scottish agates Gem & mineral ground
  The old volcanic rocks of the Scottish coast and glens weather out agates the Victorians called “Scotch pebbles,” banded in red, blue and grey, and prized enough to floor a whole jewelry trade. The Usan and Ferryden shore near...
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• Smoo Cave Cave
  A vast sea cave at Durness on the far north coast of Scotland, unusual for being cut by both the sea and a freshwater river, so you walk into an enormous outer chamber from the shore and then, inside, a waterfall pours from the...
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• Sutton Hoo Legend
  Not a hoard but a king’s ship-grave, and one of the greatest archaeological finds in Europe. In 1939, on the eve of war, a landowner asked an excavator to dig the largest of the mounds on her Suffolk estate, and under it lay the...
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• The Bell of King John / Loch Lomond Legend
  Britain’s best-documented royal loss. In October 1216, King John of England lost his entire baggage train, the crown jewels of the Angevin kings among it, in the tidal quicksands of the Wash while fleeing across the estuary....
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• The Cuerdale Hoard Legend
  The largest Viking silver hoard ever found in Britain, and one of the largest anywhere: in 1840 workmen repairing the bank of the River Ribble in Lancashire dug into a lead chest holding some 8,600 pieces of silver, coins and...
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• The Edinburgh Vaults Haunted place
  Under the South Bridge in Edinburgh is a warren of stone vaults built into the arches in the 1780s for storage and workshops. They flooded, were abandoned, and became a slum and a haunt of the city’s underworld before being...
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• The Galloway Hoard Legend
  The richest Viking-age hoard ever found in Britain or Ireland. In 2014 a metal detectorist working a field near Balmaghie in Galloway, with permission, got a signal, and out of the ground came a buried world: silver arm-rings, a...
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• The Jurassic Coast at Lyme Regis Fossil ground
  Early Jurassic, ~200 mya
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• The Lewis Chessmen Legend
  In 1831, in a sandbank on the west coast of the Isle of Lewis, someone found a hoard of little figures carved from walrus ivory and whales’ teeth, an army of grave-faced kings, queens, bishops and berserkers biting their shields:...
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• The Loch Ness Monster Legend
  The most famous lake legend on Earth. Reports of a creature in this long, deep, peat-dark Scottish loch go back to a tale of St. Columba in the 6th century, but the modern craze began in 1933 with a new lakeside road and a rush...
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• The Skaill Hoard Legend
  The largest Viking silver hoard ever found in Scotland turned up in 1858 when a boy chasing a rabbit into its burrow on the Bay of Skaill in Orkney pulled out silver instead, more than eight kilos of arm-rings, brooches and...
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• The St Ninian’s Isle Treasure Legend
  In 1958 a schoolboy helping on an archaeological dig on a tiny tidal island in Shetland lifted a stone slab in the floor of an old chapel and found a larch box holding 28 pieces of Pictish silver, brooches, bowls and a...
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• The Staffordshire Hoard Legend
  The largest hoard of Anglo-Saxon gold and silver ever found. In 2009 a man with a metal detector, working a field near Lichfield in England with permission, uncovered more than 4,000 pieces, almost all of it war-gear, sword...
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• The Tower of London Haunted place
  Nearly a thousand years of imprisonment, torture and execution have left the Tower the most famously haunted building in England: Anne Boleyn walking headless, the two little princes who vanished in 1483, the shade of Lady Jane...
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• Wanlockhead & Leadhills gold Gem & mineral ground
  Scotland’s goldfield. The Lowther Hills around Wanlockhead (the highest village in Scotland) and Leadhills have given up gold for five centuries, and the gold in the Honours of Scotland, the oldest crown jewels in Britain, came...
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Every one of these is sourced

Each entry links to the record it came from. Access rules, permits and land status vary by country and are noted where the source states them, check locally before you go.