The best-known ruins in England
Ordered by how much has been written about each place. The numbers match the map.
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Abbeys dominate. Fountains Abbey is 5 km from Ripon, Bolton Priory 13 km from Keighley, Glastonbury Abbey 20 km from Bridgwater, and Haughmond Abbey 5 km from Shrewsbury; Saint Augustine's Abbey is a kilometer from Canterbury's center, as is Leicester Abbey from Leicester's. Castles among them include Pevensey Castle 7 km from Eastbourne, Sandown Castle at Deal and Hadleigh Castle a kilometer from Hadleigh. St. Michael's Tower stands at 159 meters, 21 km from Bridgwater.
At 783 named ruins, 173 with a Wikipedia article, this is the longest list of any kind for England on this site, ahead of viewpoints (690) and castles (511). Ruins are a quest type RLQuest handles well: most are a short walk from a village, and your recorded route is enough to confirm you walked through the gatehouse rather than past it.
Every dot is a place. The numbers mark the highlights listed below.
Ordered by how much has been written about each place. The numbers match the map.
A selection, best known first, with the nearest larger town next to each.
and 731 more
RLQuest knows these places too. Which means:
Some of your daily quests lead to a real place near you. The app uses your location to check you were really there.
If you're the first person in RLQuest to complete a quest at a place, it's your first find. The Place Book shows you which kinds of place you're still missing.
Every walk uncovers tiles, each about 350 m across. Over time you can see which corners you know well, and where you've never set foot.
Place data © OpenStreetMap contributors, available under the Open Database License. Borders: geoBoundaries (CC BY 4.0); Canada: Statistics Canada. As of 2026-10-02. The list shows the places RLQuest knows and isn't complete. Photos come from Wikimedia Commons; author and license are credited on each photo.
