"The prettiest village in Wiltshire opens its village hall for a handful of December market days, the kind of small, candlelit affair the postcard villages do best."
Castle Combe Christmas Market
"A free four-day celebration of Cornish food and drink set around Padstow harbour, featuring chef demonstrations, an artisan Christmas market, a lantern parade, and a Friday-night fireworks display."
Padstow Christmas Fayre
"Bonnets, top hats and candlelight transform the timber framed National Trust village into a living Dickens novel for one twilit evening."
Dickensian Lacock
"Browse 120 Welsh artisan stalls and sip mulled cider amid the Italianate domes and pastel facades of Clough Williams-Ellis's fantasy village."
Portmeirion Christmas Fair
"The medieval village of Dunster, complete with castle and octagonal market house, transforms each December into a torch-lit winter festival with medieval re-enactment, a banquet, live music and a torchlit procession through the ancient streets."
Dunster Winter Festival
"This beautifully preserved Westmorland market town packs three days with chalet villages, indoor and outdoor markets, a lantern parade, a Ferris wheel in Market Square and live music across multiple stages in one of the Lake District's most complete and least-touristed town centres."
Kirkby Lonsdale Christmas Fair
"The North York Moors market town famous for its steam railway goes fully Victorian for a winter weekend, with staff in period dress, lantern-lit streets, costumed carol singers and a steam train pulling out of the station into the winter darkness to the sound of period band music."
Pickering Victorian Christmas
"Tetbury's beloved annual Christmas Fayre fills the streets around the historic Market House with craft and gift stalls, live music from the Silver Band, Santa's grotto, and a community lights switch-on at 6pm that draws the whole town together."
Tetbury Christmas Fayre and Market
"The historic Market Place fills with festive stalls and a Sunday fireworks display bursts above the river gorge and viaduct."
Knaresborough Christmas Market
"This steep, stone-built Peak District town strings up its lights, gathers carol singers and even brings alpacas to its farmers and craft market."
Wirksworth Christmas Weekend
"Costumed Dickens characters, carol singers and guaranteed snow flurries fill the old high street beneath the Norman castle and cathedral."
Rochester Dickensian Christmas
"The small harbour town of Yarmouth transforms its quayside into an evening market run by Island artisans, with carols in the square as the light drops over the Solent and the ferry lights move slowly past in the dark."
Yarmouth Christmas Craft Market
"The wide Georgian high street of New Alresford dresses for a Victorian-themed Christmas market where independent boutiques and local producers spread onto the broad pavements, making one of Hampshire's most handsome towns look exactly as a small-town Christmas should."
Alresford Victorian Christmas
"The village famous for sticky toffee pudding and its beautifully preserved medieval priory church wraps its square in Christmas lights each December, filling the square with local producers, food stalls and the particular warmth of a village that takes its festivities as seriously as its puddings."
Cartmel Christmas Market
"The Suffolk market town whose Norman castle looms over its rooftops brings its square alive with stalls each December, a small and properly local market where the castle walls provide a backdrop that no purpose-built Christmas market could ever replicate."
Framlingham Christmas Market
"The Royal Deeside village that sits at the foot of the hills above Balmoral holds its Christmas market each December in a setting in the Cairngorms National Park that very few other Christmas markets anywhere in Britain can match for sheer backdrop."
Ballater Christmas Market
"The town of a thousand bookshops turns its streets into a winter market each December, where hand-crafted gift stalls sit alongside the antiquarian bookshops that have made this Welsh Borders town a destination known the world over."
Hay-on-Wye Christmas Market
"The most perfect high street in the Cotswolds hosts its Christmas market each early December, with honey-gold limestone buildings lit by torches, stalls that seem to belong to another century and the smell of mulled wine drifting past the fourteenth-century Market Hall."
Chipping Campden Christmas Market
"The elegant village of Hillsborough, built around a Georgian church and an eighteenth-century castle in County Down, hosts its Christmas market each December bringing together Northern Irish craft producers and food stalls in one of the most architecturally composed village settings on the island."
Hillsborough Christmas Market
"Over 50 craft and local produce stalls fill the car-free medieval streets of Hawkshead each December, culminating in a lantern parade and Christmas carols in the village square on Saturday evening."
Hawkshead Christmas Fair
"Over a hundred stalls line the broad medieval High Street beneath the castle for a proper Dales Christmas wander."
Skipton Yuletide Festival
"This small South Lanarkshire market town, known for its remarkable puppet theatre and its unusually well-preserved High Street, lights up for a December winterfest that draws visitors from across the Clyde Valley for community entertainment and a properly Scottish Christmas welcome."
Biggar Winterfest
"This Somerset village built around a turreted castle and a working octagonal Yarn Market fills its cobbled streets for a December market, where the medieval buildings and the Exmoor hills rising beyond provide a backdrop that would be impossible to fabricate."
Dunster Christmas Market
"A brass band leads a candlelit procession down Clovelly's famously cobbled, car-free street to the harbour, where carols, Christmas grog, and fireworks over Bideford Bay raise funds for the village RNLI."
Clovelly RNLI Christmas Lights Switch On
"Since 1963 this tiny Cornish fishing village has draped its harbour walls, boats and buildings in around 7,000 hand-maintained bulbs each December, dimming them every 19th of December to honour the victims of the 1981 Penlee lifeboat disaster."
Mousehole Harbour Lights
"A free Christmas Folk Trail strings live acoustic music through the pubs and tea rooms of a Leicestershire market town across a full December weekend."
Melton Winter Festival
"More than 130 stalls from local makers, producers and the Hexham Farmers Market fill the historic Market Place, Abbey Cloisters and the medieval priory buildings of Hexham Abbey for a single festive Saturday each December."
Hexham Christmas Market
"Set around Wells Cathedral and the historic Market Place, this council-run annual market draws over 100 stalls of handmade gifts, local food and drink, and live music into one of England's smallest and most ancient cities."
Wells Christmas Market
"The night before Christmas Eve, this impossibly pretty Cornish fishing village marks the legend of a man who braved winter storms alone to bring in a catch that saved the whole village from starvation, with lantern processions down harbour lanes and a vast stargazy pie whose fish heads gaze out through the pastry crust."
Tom Bawcock's Eve
✦ Weird & Wonderful"Hundreds of Uppies and Doonies wrestle a leather ball through the streets of Kirkwall on Christmas Day and New Year's Day."
Kirkwall Ba' Game
"Mummers shrouded head to toe in newspaper strips are led by the Town Crier to perform an ancient sword-fight and resurrection play around the village."
Marshfield Paper Boys Mummers Play
✦ Weird & Wonderful"Clog-wearing longsword dancers ritually behead their captain with a lock of interwoven blades outside the village pub at eleven sharp."
Grenoside Sword Dance
✦ Weird & Wonderful"Eight dancers in military uniform weave metre-long steel swords into a single interlocked star in an unbroken display going back over 130 years."
Handsworth Sword Dancers Boxing Day
✦ Weird & Wonderful"At midnight on Boxing Day, a mob of villagers paraders through Broughton in Northamptonshire banging tin cans, dustbin lids and any other available metal objects to drive away a witch who is said to have terrorised the village centuries ago, a custom so relentlessly noisy and purposeful that nothing else quite like it survives in England."
Broughton Tin Can Band
✦ Weird & Wonderful"Around 3,000 rubber ducks are released down the River Coln at 11am on Boxing Day, a tradition now in its late 30s year that raises funds for Bibury Cricket Club and draws crowds from across the Cotswolds."
Bibury Boxing Day Duck Race
"At midnight on New Year's Eve forty odd guisers carry blazing barrels on their heads to a bonfire in the Northumberland market square, then turn to first foot the year in."
Allendale Tar Bar'l
✦ Weird & Wonderful"At Hogmanay locals swing flaming wire cages of fire over their heads down the High Street to burn away the old year."
Stonehaven Fireball Ceremony
"One of the largest Hogmanay bonfires in Scotland, lit in the heart of this Borders town every New Year's Eve."
Biggar Bonfire
"A torchlit New Year's Eve procession follows a decorated horse's skull on a pole around town, trading sung Welsh challenges for entry and refreshment."
Mari Lwyd Walk
✦ Weird & Wonderful"At the stroke of midnight villagers light ten-foot tarred birch torches and parade them behind a pipe band before hurling the flames into the River Earn."
Comrie Flambeaux
✦ Weird & Wonderful"At the stroke of midnight on Hogmanay, selected villagers carry ten-foot birch poles topped with burning tarred rags through the streets of Comrie, led by the pipe band, before hurling the spent flambeaux into the River Earn in a custom believed to date to pagan or Pictish times."
Comrie Flambeaux Procession