Four British battlefields you can still walk on today #historyshorts #britishhistory

Added: 2026-04-30

[00:00:00]Throughout British history, the future of the country has been decided on the battlefield. Here are four you should visit. In Sussex, on the 14th of October 1066, William of Normandy defeated King Harold's army in a battle that lasted 9 hours and saw the end of Anglo-Saxon England. William founded Battle Abbey on the site as penance for the bloodshed, with the high altar placed on the exact spot where Harold is said to have fallen. The altar is gone, but a stone in the grass still marks the place. The town that grew up around the abbey is called Battle. It is owned by English heritage. You can walk the ridge where Harold Shield Wall stood.

[00:00:46]In Leicester on the 22nd of August 1485, the last English king to die in battle was killed in the marshes south of Market Bosworth. Richard III led a charge straight at Henry Tuda and was unhored and cut down. The Stanley brothers, who stood on a nearby hill watching, finally committed to Henry.

[00:01:09]The battle ended the Wars of the Roses and began the TUDA dynasty. The actual location of the battlefield was lost for over five centuries and only confirmed in 2010 when archaeologists found 34 lead cannonballs buried in a field nearby a mile from where everyone thought it had actually happened. It is now the largest medieval cannonball hall ever discovered in Europe.

[00:01:36]In Northamptonshire on the 14th of June 1645, Oliver Cromwell's new army destroyed the royalist army of King Charles I. Nazby was the battle that effectively ended the first English civil war. After the fighting, the king's personal correspondence was captured from his abandoned baggage train. Parliament published it. The letter showed Charles negotiating with Catholic powers in Ireland and France for foreign troops to use against his own Protestant subjects.

[00:02:09]Political damage was permanent. Within 4 years he was on trial for his life. The battlefield is still open farmland marked with monuments and a viewing platform.

[00:02:21]And in in Vanessia on the 16th of April 1746, the last pitched battle on British soil was fought on a stretch of bleak mand called Kudan. It lasted less than an hour. The Jacobite army of Bonnie Prince Charlie, exhausted, hungry, and outnumbered, charged uphill into Hannavveria and musket and cannon fire.

[00:02:43]About 1,500 Highlanders were killed in less than 60 minutes. The clans were broken. The Highland clearances followed. The mass graves of the clansmen are still on the battlefield, each marked with a stone bearing the name of the clan buried there.