Escorted Cultural Holidays and Historical Tours
This is the part of our programme built around the places people actually want to look at properly: cathedrals, castles, museums, Roman ruins, Moorish palaces and the streets of cities that have been arguing about their own history for centuries. Some tours travel by coach from home, others by air with a tour manager, a few by rail or river.
What they share is a fixed itinerary of guided visits with the entrance fees already paid, a hotel you stay in for several nights rather than one, and enough time at each site to read the labels. No driving, no parking, no working out which ticket queue is which.
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Destinations
- Austria
- Belfast
- Champagne
- Cornwall
- Cotswolds
- Croatia
- Cyprus
- Czech Republic
- Dorset
- England
- France
- Georgia
- Germany
- Giants Causeway
- Greece
- Isle of Man
- Isle of Wight
- Isles of Scilly
- Istanbul
- Italy
- Kent
- Krakow
- Lake District
- Lake Garda
- Lisbon
- Madeira
- Malta
- Norfolk
- Northumberland
- Norway
- Prague
- Puglia
- Scotland
- Slovenia
- Snowdonia
- Somerset
- Spain
- Sweden
- Switzerland
- Umbria
- Vienna
- Wales
- Wiltshire
- Yorkshire
Frequently Asked Questions About Our Culture & Classics Tours
Yes, the visits listed on each itinerary are paid for. On the Rome tour that covers the Vatican Museums and the guided tours with headsets; in Andalucía it includes the Alhambra, the Real Alcázar and the Mezquita; on British coach tours it covers the properties named on the day-by-day. Optional extras and anything described as free time are not included, and each tour page lists exactly what is covered.
More than on a scenic coach holiday, less than on a walking holiday. Expect a couple of hours on your feet during a guided city tour, often on cobbles, with steps at castles, cathedrals and hilltop sites. There are usually places to sit and time to stop. Lifts and level routes are not guaranteed at historic properties, so if stairs or distance are a concern, ask us about a specific departure before you book.
Solo travellers make up a good part of most groups and are entirely usual on these tours. A number of our British coach holidays set aside a limited quantity of single rooms with no supplement, allocated in order of booking. On air holidays a single supplement normally applies and the amount is stated on the tour page. If you would like the current position on a particular departure, ask us.
Yes. Any of these itineraries can be run as a private group for a club, society, church or group of friends, with your own coach and your own departure date. Groups of roughly twenty-five to thirty work best, since that is the basis most tours are costed on. We can also adjust the excursions to suit a particular interest, whether that is industrial heritage, cathedrals or wartime aviation. Tell us what your members want to see.
It depends on how you travel. Our British and near-Continental coach holidays are accompanied by an experienced driver throughout, with local guides brought in for walking tours and specialist sites. Air holidays are accompanied by an English-speaking tour manager from arrival to departure, again using qualified local guides in cities such as Seville, Córdoba and Rome, where a licence is required to guide inside major monuments.
On some British itineraries, entrance to National Trust properties is covered on the basis that members present their cards, so it is worth bringing yours. Arrangements differ from tour to tour, and other properties on the same holiday may be privately owned or run by a different charity. Check the inclusions on the tour page you are looking at, or ask us and we will confirm which visits your membership covers.
Castles, cathedrals and country houses in Britain
A good deal of our heritage travel never leaves these islands, and it is often the best value we do. In Perthshire we visit Glamis, where the late Queen Mother spent her childhood, along with Scone Palace, standing beside the Moot Hill where Scottish kings were once crowned, and Blair Castle with its long white drive. In Derbyshire the anchor is Chatsworth, with Bakewell, the Buxton Crescent and the gardens at Lyme filling out the week.
Elsewhere the subject might be Roman Chester and its city walls, Lincoln's castle and cathedral hill, Tintern Abbey and the Wye gorge, or the Victorian spa architecture of Llandrindod Wells in mid Wales.
These tours travel by private coach with an experienced driver, so you are collected, driven to the door of each property and driven back. Several set aside a number of single rooms at no supplement.
Ancient Rome and the classical world
Rome rewards a guide more than almost anywhere. Our stay in the city pairs a walking tour of the ancient centre with a separate classical tour and a full day in the Vatican, taking in the Vatican Museums and St Peter's Basilica. Headsets are provided, which matters in galleries where the guide is often several heads away from you.
The Holy Door in St Peter's is opened only in a Jubilee Year, which falls every twenty-five years, and Rome is noticeably busier when it does. Sensible planning of the day makes the difference between seeing the Sistine Chapel and shuffling past it.
Beyond Italy, the classical thread runs through Greece, Cyprus, Istanbul and Croatia, where Roman and Byzantine walls tend to sit underneath everything built since. What is running in any given season is shown in the grid above.
Moorish Spain, Andalucía and Catalonia
Andalucía is the strongest single argument for a guided cultural holiday. The Alhambra in Granada admits visitors by timed ticket to the Nasrid palaces, so the ticketing is arranged for you; in Seville we visit the Real Alcázar and walk the historic centre; in Córdoba, the Mezquita with its forest of striped arches. Ronda and the whitewashed hill towns break up the driving between cities.
Catalonia is a different proposition again: the mountain monastery of Montserrat, the medieval lanes and old Jewish quarter of Girona, cava country, and the volcanic landscape of the Garrotxa. One of our Catalan itineraries includes a boat trip from Roses round to Cadaqués, the whitewashed village Dalí kept coming back to.
- Guided city tours with local guides
- Entrance fees to the major sites included
- Four-star hotels, usually two bases rather than nightly moves
Twentieth-century history and remembrance
Recent history is often the harder subject and the more absorbing one. In Belfast the day usually starts at Titanic Belfast, built beside the slipway where the ship was laid down, then takes in the political murals and City Hall before heading up the Causeway Coast. Derry follows, with its complete seventeenth-century walls, the Siege Museum and a walking tour that explains what happened here and why the arguments continued.
Lincolnshire earned the name Bomber County for the number of wartime airfields packed into it. The International Bomber Command Centre above Lincoln and the Aviation Heritage Centre at East Kirkby, where a Lancaster still taxis, are visits that tend to fall quiet.
Berlin and Potsdam cover the divided city and the Cold War, with the Brandenburg Gate standing where the wall once ran. Krakow appears in the programme too.
