The best road cycling routes around Bournemouth

A church where services are celebrated in different forms. Architecturally and historically very interesting and also valuable.

Bournemouth’s beach huts: proving since the 1900s that humanity’s greatest architectural achievement is paying a small fortune just to sit in a brightly painted shed, eating sandy sandwiches in the British rain.

The Bournemouth Big Wheel is a large Ferris wheel on the Bournemouth promenade. From the gondolas, visitors enjoy an impressive view of the coast, the beach, and the city. The attraction draws many tourists, especially during the summer months. The Ferris wheel offers a calm ride and excellent opportunities for photographing the surroundings. It is one of the city's best-known attractions and contributes to the lively atmosphere by the sea.

Nice spot. In summer it's a bit crowded and hard to find a parking spot.

Burley is the New Forest’s ultimate hotspot for all things mystical and wild! Famed for its real-life 1950s "white witch" Sybil Leek, this charming Hampshire village is packed with witch shops, magic potions, and free-roaming ponies. Grab a local cider, dodge a wild donkey, and soak up the enchanting vibes!

Start/End of Southbourne Promenade

Despite being dug up by bored Victorians, stepped on by New Forest ponies for centuries, and nearly absorbed by the surrounding shrubbery, the mound is still officially protected by law. The outer 3-metre ditch has mostly filled in with centuries of rotting leaves and grass, but it still shows up as a dark ring on modern aerial cropmark photography, proving that nature never truly lets you hide your prehistoric home-improvement projects.

To the untrained modern eye, this "ancient burial bowl" doesn’t look like a majestic final resting place for a legendary prehistoric chieftain. It looks like a 1-metre-high lump of grass that a municipal lawnmower would aggressively try to avoid. Around 3,500 to 4,000 years ago, the local New Forest Bronze Age community decided that when an important VIP passed away, digging a standard hole simply lacked flair. Instead, they opted for the "Bowl Barrow" design—which is archaeology-speak for an inverted cereal bowl made entirely of dirt, gravel, and rubble.The Thorney Hill barrow is roughly 11 metres in diameter. The entire community spent days digging a massive 3-metre-wide circular ditch, piling all that loose earth into the center to create a giant "Look at me!" hillock. It was the ultimate prehistoric neighborhood flex, designed to ensure that absolutely everyone traveling across the Forest knew exactly where the local bigwig was buried. If you walk up to it today, you will notice a suspicious, sad little dip right in the dead center of the mound.That crater is the calling card of enthusiastic 19th-century amateur antiquarians—which is a polite historical term for Victorian gentlemen who got bored on weekends, grabbed shovels, and went hunting for "pagan gold". Unfortunately for those Victorian treasure hunters (but luckily for science), the intensely acidic soil of the New Forest is notoriously brutal. It eats organic matter for breakfast. Any grand wooden coffins, fancy clothes, or skeletons dissolved into nothingness millennia ago, leaving the tomb-raiders with nothing but a giant pile of damp Hampshire mud.