12 Most Beautiful Small Towns in The UK Nobody Has Heard Of

Twelve towns across all four nations of Britain, and not one of them shows up on the usual best-of-Britain list. There's a market town raised entirely on lead mining a thousand feet up in the Pennines, an English port town whose harbour vanished from under it, and a Welsh castle town split apart by the Civil War. The final entry on this list spent two centuries feeding sailors into two different empires at once, and almost nobody outside its own islands has ever connected the two. In this video, we explore: → Alston, built a thousand feet up in the North Pennines, grew entirely out of lead mining and never got prettied up for visitors → Much Wenlock's ruined priory sits right at the edge of the town centre — and its 1850 Olympian Games inspired Pierre de Coubertin to found the modern Olympics → Winchelsea was laid out by Edward I in 1288 as a wine port built to store four million bottles a year, until the sea pulled back and left the harbour behind → Montgomery's castle was torn down by Parliamentarian forces in 1649, leaving a Georgian town untouched underneath it → Llanidloes holds the only timber-framed market hall still standing in its original spot anywhere in Britain → Wigtown went from eighty-three empty properties to Scotland's National Book Town, with seventeen bookshops and a hundred thousand books under one roof → Donaghadee's old gunpowder store became the only public camera obscura on the island of Ireland → Killyleagh's castle library educated the boy who went on to found the British Museum → Cromarty stayed almost entirely Georgian, with two hundred bottlenose dolphins swimming past its shore And at number one: a single flagstone street at the very edge of Britain that spent two centuries supplying two separate empires — and still barely gets a mention outside its own islands.