The East Midlands is the part of England most travellers skip, which is exactly why it rewards a visit. The flat farmland and quiet market towns hide some of the country's strangest stories: a king found under a car park, a forest outlaw who refuses to die, and a sandstone honeycomb of caves running under a city centre. Add the moors and white-edged dales of the Peak District on the western edge and you have a region that earns its keep without ever shouting about it.
Leicester is the obvious place to start. Roman Ratae Corieltauvorum, medieval pilgrim stop, twentieth-century industrial city, and now one of the most diverse places in Britain — the curry houses on Belgrave Road and the autumn lights of Diwali are reason enough to come. The cathedral holds the bones of Richard III, dug up in 2012 from beneath a council parking lot a few minutes' walk away; the small visitor centre on the spot tells the story better than any textbook.
To the north, Nottingham trades hard on Robin Hood, but the real city is more interesting than the legend. The lace-making boom of the nineteenth century left the Lace Market neighbourhood of tall red-brick warehouses, now full of bars and small galleries. The castle rock is riddled with man-made caves you can tour, and the pubs claiming to be the oldest in England (Ye Olde Trip to Jerusalem chief among them) are at least very old indeed. Lincoln further north is quieter, dominated by one of the great English Gothic cathedrals on a hill above the old town. Derby and Northampton round out the urban roster — both worth a stop, neither a destination in their own right.
The real outdoor draw is the Peak District, Britain's first national park and still its most visited. The southern White Peak is a maze of limestone dales, drystone walls and grey-stone villages; the northern Dark Peak rises into bleak gritstone moors that feel a lot more remote than their distance from Manchester or Sheffield suggests. Bakewell, Castleton and Edale are good bases. Stately home country runs through the same patch — Chatsworth House (the Pemberley of most film adaptations of Pride and Prejudice), Belvoir Castle and Haddon Hall are all within easy reach.
