You can find interesting bits of the past by traveling to the most unlikely places.
The town of Croft, in northern England, is a fine example of this. To anyone who isn't in the know, this village - an outlying commuter area for nearby Darlington and Middlesbrough - looks like any of a thousand other settlements in rural England. There is a church, a green and a number of pubs. The houses are old, many of them dating back several hundred years. The bridge over the River Tees (which runs through the vlillage) marks the ancient boundary between the counties of North Yorkshire and Durham. A few miles outside the village is Croft Circuit, a famous motor racetrack.
Croft, however, is famous locally as the hometown of Charles Dodgson, a writer and mathematician who found fame as a photographer and as "Lewis Carroll" - the author of Through The Looking Glass and Alice in Wonderland. Dodgson lived, with his brothers and sisters and parents, in the local Rectory. His father was priest in the village. If you ever read Carroll's poem 'Jabberwocky' in school, you might be interested to know it is based on the legend of the Sockburn Worm, 'the dragon of the Tees', a mythical creature that was supposed to guard the crossing of the river a few miles downstream from Croft.
If you're in the area and you have some means of transport, check out the small village of Piercebridge, also on the Tees, but a few miles upstream from Croft. The clock in the George Hotel was the inspiration for the famous children's song 'My Grandfather's Clock':
My grandfather's clock
Was too large for the shelf,
So it stood ninety years on the floor;
The song was written by US composer Henry Clay Work (also famous for 'Marching Through Georgia'). The clock isn't there anymore, but the hotel is - and you can use it as a base to explore the local Roman ruins. The whole village is built on the site of a Roman fort, and some of the fortifications are still visible. The bridge that you drive over to enter the village is 1800 years old and still going strong - those Romans sure knew how to build things!