25 Ultimate Experiences in Britain and Ireland

1 Soaking up the Edinburgh Festival
2 Walking the Pembrokeshire Coast Path
3 Punting on the Cam
4 Supping Guinness in Dublin
5 Wandering Borrowdale in the Lake District
6 Being humbled by Durham Cathedral
7 Cycling in the New Forest
8 Seeing the Belfast murals
9 Surfing in Newquay
10 Breathing the sea air in Tobermory, Isle of Mull
11 Hiking in Snowdonia
12 Hunting ghosts in York
13 Hitting the streets for the Notting Hill Carnival
14 Getting away from it all on Skellig Michael, off the southwest tip of Ireland
15 Getting lost in the Balti Triangle, Birmingham
16 Clubbing in London
17 Walking on Dartmoor
18 Trundling along Scotland's West Highlands Railway
19 Seeing the sun rise on the winter solstice at Brú na Bóinne Neolithic site in Ireland
20 Watching football at Old Trafford
21 Losing yourself on the back roads of Connemara
22 Strolling from St Paul’s to Tate Modern
23 Visiting the best beach in Britain: Holkham, on the Norfolk coast
24 Walking the walls of Conwy Castle, Wales
25 Experiencing Glastonbury

The Rough Guides charmed themselves into a million backpacks by pointing intrepid travellers towards authentically pongy byways rather than tourist-fleecing highways. So the first surprise about this choice of 25 “ultimate experiences” in Britain and Ireland is how conventionally touristic many of them are. Punting on the Cam; guzzling Guinness in Dublin; culture-vulturing at the Edinburgh Festival; carnivaling at Notting Hill; gawping at the Lake District – these are the kind of bog-standard day-trips flogged to Japanese and Americans by the coachload.

The next surprise is that even the Rough Guide’s street-savvy authors occasionally let themselves be dazzled by hype. If you want foreigners to taste English football at its most quintessentially passionate, why direct them to the soulless money-making machine that is modern Old Trafford? Why not Vicarage Road or Upton Park, where you still smell the fried onions and feel the agony of defeat?

Similarly, why fall in with the trendy herd and eulogise (yet again) Tate Modern – a far from comprehensive modern-art gallery that is often horribly overcrowded – when London has dozens of stunning little museums and galleries that almost nobody knows about? Or send more hordes of litter-dropping tourists up Snowdon, which is already busier than Piccadilly Circus, but make no mention of Scotland’s almost deserted Munros – all 284 of them? Or rave about Glastonbury (bizarrely described as “the grandaddy of all festivals” by someone who has no knowledge of world history before 1970) when you have a better chance of being killed by your own duvet than of getting a ticket?

Still, the great thing about this sort of list is that it is endlessly arguable. Is the Indian cuisine of Birmingham’s Balti Triangle really hotter stuff than that of Manchester’s Curry Mile or London’s Brick Lane? Call me a cynic, but I suspect that the authors couldn’t think of another way of sneaking the poor old Midlands into a list of pukka scenic glories. Is Durham Cathedral really a finer architectural wonder than, say, Wells? And why is this ecclesiastical pile extolled, while the chapel of King’s College, Cambridge, is damned with an anticlerical sniff as “a structure of forbidding, single-minded authority”?

I agree that the fish-and-chip van on the quayside at Tobermory, on the delightful Isle of Mull, provides one of the great seaside eating experiences (though the 40-minute queue to reach the counter would probably tell you that anyway). But the inclusion of “Surfing in Newquay” as another great British seaside experiences is odd. Surely Newquay offers nothing that Malibu or Bondi don’t offer ten times more thrillingly? Or am I being unpatriotic? I would have substituted one of those cheery cockles-and-mussels resorts – Brighton, Blackpool, Whitby – that you find nowhere else in the world.

Our most famous prehistoric monument isn’t included, and quite right too. These days Stonehenge is a national disgrace, and long-discussed plans for improvement have been dumped. Those responsible for this offical vandalism, from the Culture Secretary downwards, should be taken out there at dawn on Midsummer Day and ceremonially sacrificed in a peculiarly painful manner. Meanwhile, far better to direct people, as the Rough Guide does, to Ireland’s “Stonehenge” – the stunning 5,000-year-old tunnels at New-grange, with the altar that the sun’s rays hit only at dawn on the winter solstice.

Otherwise, it comes down to personal preferences. I am surprised that neither the Dorset coast nor Salisbury Plain gets a mention – both fabulous landscapes for ramblers, with the added excitement, if you stray into the wrong bits, of being shot by the Army. Lord’s cricket ground; Leeds’ gorgeous Kirkgate Market, with its irresistible odours and gaudy stalls; the abbey at Iona, possibly the most peaceful place on earth; the Thames Path, tracing not just a river but a nation’s history; the verdant gardens of Tresco on the Scillies; downtown Newcastle on a freezing Saturday night, with birds and blokes blithely flaunting as much flesh as you see at Benidorm in midsummer; Dartmouth in full sail during regatta week – all these might make my own list of classic British experiences.

But there again, they might not – because the ultimate “ultimate experience” is to meander off the main road, discover a village so enchanting, so unspoilt, that it seems like paradise on earth – and then keep quiet about it. I have a few such elysian fields locked away in my memory. And that’s they will stay.

Times recommends

• Delay your journeys to Christmas Day, drivers told
• Where to ski, month-by-month, this season
• The Times Christmas Walks: 20 winter rambles