1. In which county is the apple tree that supposedly inspired Isaac Newton’s Theory of Gravity?
2. The Dales Way is an 80-mile trek that runs from Ilkley to where?
3. What place in the UK is often referred to as the ‘home of cricket’ and is also home to the world’s oldest sporting museum?
4. Which UK beach featured in the films Robin Hood and Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows?
5. What is the name of Scotland’s oldest purpose-built visitor attraction?

(Questions courtesy of UK Attraction)

Check your answers here!

From Diagon Alley to the Leaky Cauldron, take a private black taxi tour of Harry Potter sites by black taxi. Nobody knows the streets of London like a cab driver, and each taxi can hold up to five wizards and/or Muggles. This is your chance to put yourself in the shoes of Harry Potter and friends as you tour the sights of London!

Highlights

• Three-hour private tour of London’s Harry Potter locations by black taxi
• Private tour led by your expert driver-guide
• Exclusive to Viator: Visit the locations featured in the fifth film in the series, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix
• Choice of morning or afternoon tours
• Pick-up and drop-off from central London hotels

Hop aboard and your expert taxi driver/guide will take you to the sites made famous by the Harry Potter series. First stop is Diagon Alley, where Harry and his friends visit at the start of every school year to pick up their supplies of spell books, robes, wands and other items in preparation for their return to Hogwarts.

Walk through the wall to get to platform 9¾ at King’s Cross Station where the Hogwarts Express departs. Then see the place where Harry and Ron stole Ron’s father’s flying car. Stand on the bridge where the Knight bus crossed the Thames from the third book, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, and visit the all-new Leaky Cauldron.

Follow Harry’s flight to London with Dumbledore’s Army and see the bridges, buildings and ships they pass along the way. Enter the telephone box that descends into the Ministry of Magic below. Stand right where Harry and Voldemort come face to face for the first time since the Triwizard tournament in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire.

Last stop is the Headquarters of the Order of the Phoenix, which is also home to Harry’s beloved godfather, Sirius Black.

This tour offers fantastic value for money, comfortably seating up to five passengers for one fixed price!

The tour is exclusive to Viator so please click on the link below to find out more and to book online.

Viator: Private Tour: "Harry Potter" Black Taxi Tour of London

For more information about the St Leger and to book online, please visit the Doncaster Racecourse website.

For other excursions and activities in the north of England, why not see what Viator has to offer?

For worldwide excursions, tours and tickets, please visit our main Viator page.

(We earn commission at no extra cost to you on any bookings made using our links, so please help us to keep the site going by using our links. Thank you.)

Hotel Novotel Edinburgh Park
15 Lochside Avenue
EDINBURGH
EH12 9DJ

Having booked a flight with Ryanair from Edinburgh to Malta that departed at 0610, it was pretty well inevitable that we were going to want somewhere to crash out for a couple of hours at least after the long drive down the A9 and M90. The Novotel Edinburgh Park offered the cheapest nearby option.

We booked the room online via the ever excellent Agoda. Bizarrely, it was £10 cheaper to book a room with breakfast than without – though since we weren’t expecting to be around for breakfast anyway, it wouldn’t have mattered to us if breakfast had been more expensive.

On being informed in advance that special assistance was required, the hotel provided an excellent wheelchair, which they allowed me to keep for the duration of our stay. They also gave us a specially adapted room with facilities for disabled people such as a roll-in shower with seat, all of which made things so much easier. The room itself was quite nice too.

The staff were friendly and helpful too – the receptionist who checked us in even came out to the car to help me into the chair and to help carry our bags to the room – so at first I was quite impressed by this place.  We’ve stayed at another Novotel before and didn’t enjoy the experience so we were pleasantly surprised at this one.

However, the pleasure was short-lived when we discovered that the WiFi was unusable because the signal was too weak.  They suggested we tried their cable service instead, which we did, but neither we nor they could get that to work either.

They then suggested we could use their free Internet facility in the lobby instead, but having got settled into the room that didn’t seem like a very convenient option for us.  Finally, they said not to worry – their maintenance person would fix it in the morning.  But since we were checking out at about 4am that wasn’t much good to us either.

The food was relatively expensive, as one would expect from an airport hotel, but the £3 room service charge seemed a bit excessive.

At check-in, the receptionist was explaining where breakfast was served when Dave mentioned that we would be checking out very early and so would miss it. She immediately offered to provide us with two breakfast bags so that we would at least have something to eat at the airport. This sounded great.

Sure enough, when we checked out, the receptionist (a different one by this time) went and fetched two large bags for us. Each consisted of two Danish pastries (apple and chocolate), a rather squashed-looking croissant (but no butter or other spread), an apple, a vanilla-flavoured yoghurt, a raspberry-flavoured drinking yoghurt and a carton of orange juice. We weren’t really in the mood for any of it, although Dave later drank one of the raspberry yoghurts and reported that it tasted quite nice.

All in all what could have been a good hotel stay was marred by the lack of Internet in the room.

by Mike Jackson

Ever been driving along a motorway, seen a building, and wondered what it was?

Wonder no more. Mike Jackson and his small team have trawled the lengths of three of Britain’s longest motorways to find out for you!

Sadly, the M5 Sights Guide is out of print at the moment – which is a pity because that’s probably the one of the three motorways I know the best. But there’s enough consistency between the other two books to establish that all three share the same approach. (As I know the bottom end of the M6 fairly well, that’s the one I read most closely.)

The Guides attempt “to identify and describe every object of some significance that a passenger in a vehicle would easily be able to notice whilst travelling along the motorway”. The idea’s not all that new – as Jackson points out, John Ogilby did much the same in his map of the coach route from London to Aberystwyth in 1675! But these books revive and revamp the idea in a particularly effective way.

What makes these Guides really stand out is their diagrammatic approach. Each open two-page view contains a heavily simplified schematic diagram of a section of the motorway, running in a straight line either from north to south or from west to east. The scale varies, being reduced to miss out boring bits or expanded to allow enough space for the more interesting areas. Every bridge is mapped, and so are the emergency phones. And there’s a key map in the corner to show the section of the motorway as it would appear on a conventional map.

Most of the text is in plain grey. But there’s also clever colour-coded text, taking its cue from motorway signage. So blue text refers to destinations on the motorway signs, or denotes facts about the motorways themselves. Brown text is used for tourist destinations. There’s also italic text for where the motorway crosses a waterway (blue) or railway (brown).

There are loads of photographs. For clearer mapping, photos outside boxes appear on the diagrams more or less where they ought to in relation to the motorway; photos in boxes generally have a pointer to where they lie (the exception being service stations). Where a landmark’s visible only from one of the carriageways, that’s indicated too.

But the photographs are only part of the story. The captions are the real meat, and make for entertaining – often fascinating – reading. They’re emphatically not your standard tourist guide, so you won’t find stock descriptions of landmarks already done to death elsewhere. As the caption for Carlisle says, “We don’t attempt to replicate the stuff you can find in tourist bureaux. Instead we like the incongruous or obscure.” This means that much of the comment is personal, either by the team themselves or by the people they interviewed while researching. It makes for a quirky but interesting read.

The Guides also have a surprisingly strong “green” thread to them. Jackson’s preface to the M6 book bewails the impact of the modern British economy on the planet, painting a picture of goods coming in at Felixstowe, then being trucked up along the A14 to the M6 before being delivered to the new 24-hour Tesco at Whitehaven. Environmental concerns crop up from time to time throughout the books – though I hasten to add that these entries don’t preach at you, they just give you food for thought.

At £9.99 each, the books are pretty good value. You’re getting a lot of content, attractively presented. The pages in my copy of the M6 Guide did start coming out rather too quickly for my liking – and for books like these, you’ll be doing a lot of page-turning. (Especially since there’s a strong chance the books will be read by child passengers – as the front cover warns, they’re not for use by drivers while travelling.) But give them a better binding (even stronger glue might help) and I’d say they’re about as good as you’ll get.

M6 Sights Guide

Mike Jackson
Paperback, 96 pages
2004, Severnpix Publishing
ISBN 0-9545402-1-2
RRP: £9.99

M4 Sights Guide

Mike Jackson
Paperback, 96 pages
2005, Severnpix Publishing
ISBN 0-9545402-2-0
RRP: £9.99

M5 Sights Guide

Mike Jackson
Paperback, 96 pages
2004, Severnpix Publishing
ISBN 0-9545402-0-4
RRP: £9.99