"A cliff-top open-air theatre carved from Cornish granite above Porthcurno Bay, where productions from Shakespeare to musicals run each summer with the Atlantic as backdrop and Rowena Cade's extraordinary creation as the stage."

Minack Theatre Season

"Throughout June, Flamborough villagers fill their gardens and doorsteps with elaborate flowerpot models of Elvis, Spiderman and beloved characters, turning this headland village into a free family trail that has been featured on BBC News."

Flamborough Flowerpot Festival

"A purpose-built opera house in a Cotswolds village presents Wagner, Handel, Verdi and Humperdinck across a full summer season, one of the UK's most ambitious small opera festivals in a setting of extraordinary rural beauty."

Longborough Festival Opera

"Three operas including La Boheme, Eugene Onegin and Handel's Giulio Cesare are performed across 26 summer nights in the neo-classical Grange at Northington, a Hampshire country house of exceptional theatrical beauty."

The Grange Festival

"For 16 June days, 152 artists across Surrey open their studios, gardens, barns and homes as galleries, with self-guided village art trails including the Hindhead Art Trail guiding visitors through the county's creative heartland."

Surrey Artists Open Studios

"The largest free nautical music festival in Europe. The whole harbour town sings, in pubs and on quaysides, all weekend long."

Falmouth Sea Shanty Festival

"Folk music at a ruined 13th-century castle on the Gower peninsula, with the estuary below and the sky doing something remarkable above."

Gower Folk Festival

"A small Highland village fills with musicians every June. The mountains are the backdrop and the sessions go late."

Killin Music Fest

"On a June weekend, Bromyard's market town fills with scarecrows on a Heroes or Villains theme, culminating in a Friday evening grand parade where schools, scouts and families wheel their creations through the streets to the town green for judging."

Bromyard Scarecrow Festival

"A proper countryside fair in the Surrey Hills: farm animals, tractor rides, traditional countryside skills, artisan producers and live music around an agricultural college with views over the Downs."

Surrey Hills Country Fair

"A weekend celebration of local food producers, street food, live music and art on the Dorset coast at Highcliffe, where artisan stalls, live cooking demonstrations and family entertainment fill the clifftop town each June."

Highcliffe Food and Arts Festival

"An honest market town doing what market towns do, on the second Sunday of every month. The kind of morning that stays with you."

Bedale Farmers Market

"Cheese, bread and chocolate stalls set up in Roberts Park within Titus Salt's perfectly preserved Victorian model village and World Heritage Site."

Saltaire Farmers' Market

"A dozen gardens centred on two village greens open their gates, including the listed serpentine Crinkle Crankle walled garden at Tostock Place, with homemade cakes in the churchyard tea tent."

Tostock Open Gardens

"Caber-tossers, dancers and pipers fill the grand lawns of Glamis Castle, the childhood home of the late Queen Mother."

Strathmore Highland Games

"About 25 Cotswold stone cottage gardens open in a village famous for its roses, with cake stalls, a plant stall and flowers blazing in the medieval church."

Langford Village Open Gardens

"More than 15 hidden gardens open in one of Surrey's most photographed villages, tucked between the North Downs and the Tillingbourne stream with roses round every corner."

Shere Open Gardens

"Up to eight gardens open beside the River Ise, from small terraced plots to the sweeping grounds of Bosworth House, with a medieval church, a friendly pub and a little bridge to cross."

Arthingworth Open Gardens

"Private gardens open around the home town of the Victorian Snowdrop King to raise funds for the project that plants thousands of bulbs on the town's verges and roundabouts each year."

Shepton Mallet Open Gardens

"A varied group of village gardens open in Repton, one of Mercia's oldest towns, where the prep school grounds and a ruined priory set the scene for a gentle summer day."

Repton NGS Village Gardens

"Two days on the Cheshire Plain where the county's farming tradition meets its food obsession: supreme cattle champions, extraordinary local cheesemakers, and a show that has been held at Tabley since 1949."

Royal Cheshire County Show

"Scotland's greatest show. Livestock, land machinery, Highland dancing, and malt whisky in the sun, if you happen to be lucky."

Royal Highland Show

"Contemporary and traditional music plays out across the wooded Hopton Court estate alongside a woodland spa, storytelling and four nights under canvas."

Beardy Folk Festival

"A four-acre garden of formal lawns, wildflower meadow and fruit trees opens through the summer at the foot of Painswick, the Cotswolds hilltop village known as the Queen of the Wolds."

Richmond Villages Painswick Garden

"Ten years of this boutique midsummer festival deep in a North Yorkshire valley, with reggae, ska, folk and blues on woodland stages, art installations among the trees, craft workshops and the kind of community feel that only an independent festival still run with genuine love can produce."

Willowman Festival

"The 32nd year of a world-class classical music festival in a Roman village near York, where the Times said it is well on its way to being one of the leading fixtures on the calendar and where the Orchestra of Opera North opens the programme in a meadow."

Northern Aldborough Festival

"The grounds of a Tudor manor house, local artisan producers, chef demonstrations, and a weekend that develops a habit of producing purchases you hadn't planned on."

Surrey Country & Craft Food Show

"Wales's oldest classical music festival, held in the timbered hall and gardens of Gregynog near Newtown."

Gregynog Festival

"A small volunteer-run seaside festival spills Morris sides, ceilidhs and folk music across the back beach and seafront of a Devon estuary town."

Teignmouth Folk Festival

"A whole weekend of English and American folk dancing from Playford to the present, with national callers and bands across three halls, marking its 50th year."

Lichfield Folk Festival

"Over fifty acts play pubs, churches and the open street across this market town's ancient cobbled lanes for a weekend of acoustic music and morris."

Beverley Folk Festival

"A small, reasonably priced village festival celebrating its 20th year with singarounds, workshops and ballad sessions in the Somerset countryside."

West Somerset Folk Festival

"One of England's oldest sheepdog trials since 1908, held on a remote Pennine hillside above Holmfirth where handlers and dogs have competed over the same windswept ground for more than a century."

Harden Moss Sheepdog Trials

"Forty years of world-class orchestral, folk and jazz music performed in a soaring medieval wool church at the heart of one of Essex's most perfectly preserved small towns."

Thaxted Festival

"Ten days of Cornish midsummer magic rooted in the ancient Feast of St John, with processions, Morris dancers, sea shanties, a torchlit serpent dance on the Eve of Midsummer and the massive Mazey Day street party filling Penzance each June."

Golowan Festival and Mazey Day

"A harbour town that comes properly alive in midsummer, stalls on the quayside, live music, and the smell of the sea all day."

Emsworth Summer Festival

"Children dress and dance around an ancient hawthorn said to descend from the Glastonbury Thorn."

Bawming the Thorn

"A week of riding the marches, crowning of the Beltane Queen and pageantry in this Tweed valley town."

Peebles Beltane Festival

"You retrace the old cattle drovers' mountain trails to a long-lost Drovers' inn that is reopened for one day to pour locally brewed ale."

Drovers Walks

"One of the country's largest commercial-vehicle gatherings sprawls over 75 Cheshire acres with lawn mower racing, tractor pulling and a falconry display."

Kelsall Steam & Vintage Rally

"81 years of County Down agriculture at Glenbrook Farm, where livestock classes run from poultry to pedigree cattle alongside craft stalls in a village show that has never forgotten why it started."

Saintfield Show

"Contestants eat as many two-foot lengths of raw stinging nettle as they can in one hour at the Bottle Inn in Marshwood, while a separate competition crowns the grower of the longest nettle within ten miles of the pub."

World Stinging Nettle Eating Championship

"A stone-built village centred on a triangular green uses the midsummer custom of well dressing to turn its quiet lane into a gallery of flower petals and river-gathered seeds pressed into soft Derbyshire clay."

Litton Well Dressing

"High above Lathkill Dale, this tiny limestone village dresses its wells against a backdrop of one of the most beautiful river valleys in the Peak District, where the spring light turns everything to silver."

Over Haddon Well Dressing

"A village that has opened its gardens and decked its church with themed floral art since 1963, with over 20 plots ranging from classic cottage to lovably eccentric."

Flore Flower Festival and Open Gardens

"The Aberdeenshire market town of Oldmeldrum hosts its Highland games on the longest days of the year, when the evening light in the northeast lasts until midnight and the caber tosses and pipe bands feel like they belong to the oldest possible version of a Scottish summer."

Oldmeldrum Highland Games

"Craighead Park in this South Lanarkshire village hosts Highland games that have run without interruption for well over a century, a local event that stands apart from the tourist circuit and is attended almost entirely by people who drove twenty minutes from home."

Lesmahagow Highland Games

"Over 330 artists open bars, barns, cafes, churches and hallways across Warwickshire and Coventry for two weeks, creating a self-guided trail through villages and towns where you can meet makers working in their own spaces."

Warwickshire Open Studios Summer Art Weeks

"The Carmarthenshire Young Farmers' Club summer show: a bilingual, energetic all-day event combining traditional livestock classes with a lively showcase of rural Welsh community life."

St Clears YFC Show

"A long-running Surrey carnival on the A23 Recreation Ground, with a traditional parade, family entertainment and local community stalls drawing the whole town together on a June Saturday."

Horley Carnival

"One of Cheshire's best-preserved black-and-white timber-framed villages runs an annual scarecrow trail through its lanes and cottage gardens, where the handmade figures compete for prizes and the village itself, looking entirely unchanged since the Elizabethan period, provides a backdrop that no other scarecrow trail in England can match."

Great Budworth Scarecrow Trail

"The Surrey village built around the ornamental lake created for George III holds its annual summer fete each June, a classic English village event on the edge of the Royal landscape of Windsor Great Park where marquees go up on the village green and the smell of cut grass and coconut shy mingles with the lake beyond."

Virginia Water Village Fete

"The medieval hilltop village comes alive with 40 stalls, live music and the flavours of East Suffolk in a community market that refreshes four times a year."

Wickham Market Summer Market on the Hill

"Over 70 sea-themed scarecrows fill a Wiltshire village each June, with musicians, stalls and the Elizabeth Coles charity prize; the festival has raised over £120,000 for good causes since it began in 2000."

Kington Langley Scarecrow Festival

"Broad Street in a cress-farm town, third Sunday of the month. Everything local. Nothing superfluous. The right kind of Sunday."

Alresford Farmers Market

"A single-day show at Otterington Hall that quietly holds its own against the bigger county shows, Dales livestock, local producers, and that specifically North Yorkshire sense of unhurried competence."

North Yorkshire County Agricultural Show

"Dales farmers and makers fill the cobbled Market Square of this Wharfedale village with artisan bread, preserves and locally reared meat."

Grassington Farmers' Market

"Billed as the biggest in Devon, the Civic Square fills with food and craft stalls in this famously bohemian South Hams town."

Totnes Good Food Sunday Market

"A full range of gardens open in Kilsby, from tiny terraced plots to generous summer borders, in a canal-era village whose name echoes with a great Victorian railway tunnel."

Kilsby Open Gardens

"Twenty acres of gardens and lakeside walks open around a medieval moated manor in a quiet corner of north Norfolk, with roses grown here for centuries and woodland beyond."

Mannington Estate Gardens

"The Grampian Transport Museum at Alford hosts this outdoor celebration of north-east Scotland's food and drink producers each June, a showcase of Aberdeenshire's extraordinary larder of beef, fish, game and artisan produce set in the Howe of Alford with the Grampian hills rising on every side."

Best of Grampian

"Three days of Cornwall at its most itself: cattle, cream teas, local crafts, and the Atlantic light slanting over the showground."

Royal Cornwall Show

"Livestock, horticulture and countryside pursuits at the foot of the Malvern Hills. Three counties, one great show."

Royal Three Counties Show

"The great flat-county show: machinery, livestock, and vast quantities of local produce under an enormous Lincolnshire sky."

Lincolnshire Show

"Two days of East Anglia at its proudest: livestock, machinery, food, and the particular flat-sky light of a Norfolk June."

Royal Norfolk Show

"The world's first Fairtrade town fills its independent high street with fairy-tale scarecrows placed by residents themselves, finishing with a funfair finale at the sports club."

Garstang Summer Festival and Scarecrow Trail

"The UK's biggest poetry festival fills a black-and-white timbered Herefordshire town with ten days of readings, workshops and spoken word."

Ledbury Poetry Festival

"A tiny non-profit folk and indie gathering in a private Derbyshire garden north of Matlock celebrates its 20th anniversary with free-roaming family fun."

Exile Music Festival

"Road and rail come together at Swanage Railway in a three-day celebration of transport history, with full-size steam engines on the field, heritage trains still running, and a rare chance to ride a brake van down a track not normally open to passengers."

Roads to Rail Steam Rally

"A convoy of up to twenty coal-fired steam engines rolls through Tyrone on a summer Friday, filling Hotel Rue car park in Omagh with hissing steel and live music in one of Northern Ireland's most spectacular and unusual public spectacles."

Great Northern Road Run

"Gateway Square on the last Saturday of the month. New Forest produce, familiar faces, and no particular reason to rush home."

Ringwood Farmers Market

"Five wells dressed over several days in a Peak District village above Bradford Dale, with the blessing on the Saturday afternoon, Youlgrave has one of the most technically accomplished well-dressing traditions in Derbyshire."

Youlgrave Well Dressing

"On the last Saturday of the month the Agricultural Business Centre fills with Peak District producers, in the town that gave its name to the pudding."

Bakewell Farmers' Market

"Petal pictures dress the wells beside the great Peak District church known as the Cathedral of the Peak."

Tideswell Well Dressing

"A multi-award-winning north Oxfordshire market where thirty stalls fill the Market Place and craft sellers spill into the church, even a Swedish cook in the mix."

Deddington Farmers' Market

"Scottish fiddle supergroup Blazin' Fiddles welcomes fiddlers, guitarists and pianists to venues across this Lanarkshire town for a weekend of classes, sessions and craic."

Blazin in Biggar

"Run by the Banbury Steam Society, this Oxfordshire field fills with steam engines, shire horses, tank driving and a Battle of Britain flypast."

Bloxham Steam & Country Fair

"The oldest free Highland games in Scotland, held by royal charter every year since 1314 in honour of the Ceres men who marched home from Bannockburn."

Ceres Highland Games

"Known as the friendliest games in the area, set among the trees in the glorious grounds of Drumtochty Castle just outside Auchenblae."

Drumtochty Highland Games

"The 150th anniversary Bessbrook show brings livestock, horses, home industries, a food village and a fairground to a County Armagh estate kept alive by volunteers since 1876."

Newry Agricultural Show

"A community agricultural show in one of County Down's most picturesque castle villages on Strangford Lough, with livestock, home industries and the particular pleasure of a small show done properly."

Killyleagh Show

"A warmly bilingual Conwy Valley rural show with hand shearing, shire horses, guinea pigs and pairs of sheep led two on a halter."

Llanrwst Show

"Running on Bessbrook farmland since 1869, this is one of Ireland's longest unbroken agricultural shows."

Newry Show

"A renowned vintage and makers market spills across the walled gardens of Glenarm Castle for one charming summer weekend."

The Tedberry Market at Glenarm Castle

"Twenty-five acoustic acts from folk to blues fill the pubs and barns of Dentdale across a long June weekend, washed down with locally crafted and Scottish ales in one of the most remote and beautiful limestone valleys in the Yorkshire Dales."

Dentdale Music and Beer Festival

"Chester's Victorian park hosts a full summer season of theatre from late June through early September, with Shakespeare, new writing and family shows performed in an intimate outdoor setting a short walk from the city walls."

Grosvenor Park Open Air Theatre

"A gateway village to Chatsworth and Haddon Hall turns its roadside wells into petalled mosaics each late June, a last quiet spectacle before the tourist road grows busy with summer."

Rowsley Well Dressing

"Tucked between Mam Tor and Win Hill in the Hope Valley, this charming village presses vivid petalled panels beside its springs each summer while the great ridgelines of the Peak stand watch overhead."

Hope Well Dressing

"Europe's biggest falconry gathering fills the walled parkland of Duncombe Park with swooping hawks and austringers, where a medieval art is practiced at elite modern competition level over two summer days."

British Falconry and Raptor Fair

"The whole village tips out onto the leisure centre lawns for parkour displays, local craft stalls and an afternoon of street food in the rolling Essex hills."

Danbury Village Summer Fete

"Around 15 to 20 private gardens open in a small Welsh market town draped in floral displays, with a plant market and picnic spots beside the River Usk."

Usk Open Gardens

"70 years since the first rally, this County Durham estate show still gathers huge steam engines, vintage commercials and classic cars in the grounds of Lambton Castle."

Chester-le-Street Steam and Vintage Fair

"A bilingual Welsh and English show in the Conwy Valley, with Welsh Black cattle and Welsh Mountain ponies competing on a June Saturday in the market town below the Carneddau."

Llanrwst Rural Show

"40 floats parade through Farnham on a Stage and Screen theme, followed by a fayre in Gostrey Meadow from 2pm, organised by the Hedgehogs of Farnham since the 1900s."

Farnham Carnival

"The Thames-side village of Hurst holds its two-day show each late June with livestock, horticulture, show jumping and a country fayre that draws the farms and market gardens of the Loddon valley together in one of Berkshire's best-attended traditional summer events."

Hurst Show and Country Fayre

"Two days of food, drink, music and family fun in Colchester Castle Park, celebrating the produce of Britain's oldest recorded town and the farmers and makers of north Essex."

Colchester Food and Drink Festival

"One of the oldest agricultural shows in the Holme Valley, back on its Farnley Tyas showground with heavy horses, livestock lines and a proper Pennine village welcome."

Honley Show

"A full day of folk sessions, open stages and real ale in the walled gardens of Nowton Park, where the 12th festival gathers East Anglia's finest acoustic talent."

Bury Folk Festival

"Four wells dressed in flowers, seeds and clay by local hands, blessed on a June Sunday afternoon, and left to fade through the week. An ancient Derbyshire custom, unchanged."

Bakewell Well Dressing

"The Cathedral city's market, twice monthly. A Sunday morning with the High Street, the close, and nowhere better to be."

Winchester Market

"A market under the Hartley Wintney oaks on the last Sunday of the month, Hampshire smallholders and bakers in a famously leafy village on the old coaching road."

Hartley Wintney Farmers' Market

"A celebration of the prized Comber Earlies potato, with a food village in this County Down market town."

Comber Earlies Food Festival

"Eight gardens open along the winding lanes of a postcard village above the River Dart, with a plant stall on The Level and two riverside pubs serving in support of Rowcroft Hospice."

Dittisham Open Gardens

"In its 57th year and the first open gardens event of its kind in the country, around twenty gardens welcome visitors with a vintage tractor rally and Morris dancers winding through a timbered Brett valley village."

Chelsworth Open Gardens

"A dozen gardens in a pretty village near Richmond open up, one holding the National Collection of sea-holly eryngiums, with a miniature gardens competition for under-12s."

Gilling West Secret Gardens

"Almost the whole of this Wensleydale village in the Yorkshire Dales joins in, opening around twenty gardens with refreshments served all day in the Village Institute."

Carperby Village Open Gardens

"This moorland village at the foot of Kinder Scout dresses its wells with intricate petal-and-clay panels each late June, turning the stone streets of this northern Peak District gateway into a week of living art."

Hayfield Well Dressing

"A small, deeply traditional Lakeland show in the shadow of Helvellyn with gundog displays, terrier racing, ferret racing, fell running and dry stone walling, all packed into a village field beside Ullswater."

Ullswater Country Fair

"Dozens of walled town gardens open in one of England's best-preserved medieval market towns, alongside a garden market in the ancient centre."

Faversham Open Gardens and Garden Market

"Three private gardens open in a Stirlingshire village at the foot of the Campsie Fells, from a tiny walled garden with a topiary rabbit to a Victorian arbour with views of the hills."

Gardens of Milton of Campsie

"A Lincolnshire village vintage show with over 250 classic vehicles, a Lancaster Bomber flypast and the 19th World Egg Throwing Championships, where international teams hurl eggs for distance, accuracy and sheer spectacular mess."

Swaton Vintage Day and World Egg Throwing Championships

"On the last Sunday of June, the Yorkshire Dales village of Upperthong crowns a world champion welly boot thrower: the only official championship for this deeply Yorkshire sport, invented here with a maximum run-up of exactly 42 paces as specified by Douglas Adams."

World Welly Wanging Championship

"On St Peter's Day the children of an Eden Valley village process to church in flower crowns and rush crosses, the girls crowned, the boys bearing crosses, a quiet survival of a once common rite."

Warcop Rushbearing

"Shin-kicking, tug of war and a torchlit procession on Dover's Hill, games first held in 1612."

Robert Dover's Cotswold Olimpicks