As we close out the year, we’ll be doing a few different things in each week’s Issue.

You may not have ever heard of a small village in Hampshire called Chawton but you most definitely have heard of its most famous resident, novelist Jane Austen.

Continuing our visits to out of the way villages, today we go to Great Missenden. A village in Buckinghamshire that had a very famous resident!

We travel to Shropshire this week to the village of Ironbridge, said to be the birthplace of the Industrial Revolution. Its story and that of the bridge that gave the village its name is fascinating, with long reaching threads to this day.

This month we will take a tour of English Villages and Towns.

Our tour of Yorkshire concludes this week, when we travel to Whitby and its stunning hilltop Abbey.

This week we travel to Wales to see another impressive Cistercian monastery - Tintern Abbey. I visited Tintern with my fellow history students on a ‘reading party’ weekend in Herefordshire. We were each assigned three new title history books to read and report on to the group, each night of our 5 night stay.

This week we continue our tour of Yorkshire and visit Fountains Abbey and Studley Royal. A UNESCO World Heritage site, it is a magnificent collection of ruins, walks, lakes and even a deer park.

We are into the last quarter of the year already! How did that happen?