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Castles, cathedrals and the Cavern Club: historians make their choices of key sites in Britain’s past for book Which was more important in the making of Britain, a ruined abbey, a Dorset tree, a Liverpool cellar or a painted gable in Northern Ireland? Battle Abbey was where Harold lost his crown and his life to William the Conqueror in 1066; Tolpuddle where in 1830 a group of agricultural labourers discussed forming a union and paid for their audacity with transportation to Australia; and Free Derry Corner looks down on the narrow streets where 13 unarmed demonstrators were shot dead by the army in 1972. All are among the 100 sites nominated by historians to appear in a book as the places that made the modern nation. The Liverpool cellar nominated by Peter Catterall, lecturer at Queen Mary, University of London, was a fruit warehouse, air raid shelter and egg packing station before in 1957 it became a music club and four years later gave the world the Beatles. “I don’t think music was the only element of the 1960s, but it came to be emblematic of it,” Catterall says. “You can’t imagine Swinging London without the music. In a sense the band that made everything possible was the Beatles; it was they who paved the way for the idea that the British were good at music.” David Musgrave, who edited the book, spent months tramping around the ruins, industrial landscapes, archaeological sites, castles and cathedrals, and odd corners once brushed by the hand of history, checking out the 100 places nominated by scores of historians. Many are internationally renowned, including the Tower of London, Westminster Abbey, Canterbury Cathedral and Blenheim Palace. There are surprises. Gerard De Groot, professor of history at St Andrews, chose a nearby stretch of smooth green turf: the Old Course overlooked by the clubhouse of the Royal and Ancient golf club. Historians have often ignored the significance of sport, he argues. “It is hugely important in the sense that it’s not just seen as a leisure pursuit. It’s a package of cultural values that have been exported along with the other elements of civilisation that the British feel they have given to the rest of the world.” He added: “Sports have been seen not just as a way to exercise and have fun, but also as a way to convey the cultural values of fair play, decency and honesty. It’s interesting that golf embodies that better than most because it is based on the fundamental honesty between the people playing it.” John Morrill, professor of British and Irish history at Selwyn College, Cambridge, chose a little 16th-century folly in Northamptonshire, Rushton Triangular Lodge, which was built by the unswervingly Roman Catholic Sir Thomas Tresham as a blatant symbol of his belief in the Holy Trinity. “You get a sense of the religious passion and the religious obsession that was to dominate the whole of the political and social life of people in Britain and Ireland over the early modern period. There’s no building I can think of that tells us more of these passions during the century after the Reformation.” The gable with the painted slogan “You are now entering Free Derry” chosen by Claire Fitzpatrick, history lecturer at Plymouth University, stands witness to the long shadow of the wars of religion. “In a place like Northern Ireland which is big on commemoration, it was symbolic to write on that Free Derry wall. This is a nationalist area and they felt locked out of the city, so Free Derry Corner is the ironic response to the city walls. It’s an important part of British history within the context of British identity.” Musgrave, who edits the BBC History magazine, imposed only one criterion on the historians: that all the sites had to be open to the public, so readers can make their own pilgrimages and argue the merit of the choices. He added one of his own, the field in Leicestershire where the Battle of Bosworth was fought in 1485 – which was only pinpointed by archaeologists last year. The battle changed the course of English history when Richard III, the last Plantagenet king and the last monarch to die in battle, literally lost his crown when it fell from his head and rolled under a bush to be retrieved for the victorious Henry Tudor. Musgrave chose his top 10 from the 100 for the Guardian and, forced to choose his absolute favourite, eventually plumped for Sutton Hoo, in Suffolk, where in 1939 the grave of an Anglo-Saxon prince was found, his treasure heaped around in him in the ghostly outline of the long since rotted timbers of his ship. The site was nominated by Julian Richards, professor of archaeology at the University of York, who said: “Until the discovery of Sutton Hoo, historians and archaeologists had taken rather a dim view of the Anglo-Saxon barbarians who had stepped into the power vacuum after the departure of the legions.” Musgrave was entranced by its atmosphere: “The place where Anglo-Saxon history comes alive, and the site of one of the greatest archaeological finds ever made. I love it there, the landscape feels like it’s been picked up from Denmark and plonked down in East Anglia – or maybe that’s just me.” Musgrave’s top 10 • Iona: the Scottish island was a key location in the early days of Britain’s Christian story • Sutton Hoo, Suffolk: A find that gave insight into the mysterious Anglo-Saxon world • Battle Abbey: 1066 and all that. A key English battlefield, where Harold lost to William and history took a decisive turn • Dunfermline Abbey: Scottish church where the remains of Robert the Bruce were rediscovered in 1818 • Dolbadarn Castle: a seat of native Welsh power before the Anglo-Normans dominated Britain • Longthorpe Tower: Cambridgeshire medieval tower with surviving 14th-century domestic secular wall paintings • Hampton Court: spectacularly preserved window into the Tudor world • Putney church: the site in south-west London of days of passionate debate on the rights of man during the English civil war • Blaenavon: the best preserved ironworks in south Wales and a key site in the industrial revolution • Belfast Titanic Footprint: The Northern Ireland site where the doomed transatlantic liner was built Heritage History Heritage Maev Kennedy guardian.co.uk