England Geography Trivia
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50 free England Geography trivia questions with answers — geography quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
England packs a surprising amount of geography into a small space: a county with two coastlines, a village lost to the sea, a plateau whose trespassers changed the law, and hill figures older than Rome. This quiz covers the counties and their county towns, the regions, the national parks and protected landscapes, the waterways, headlands, islands and extreme points. Every question carries a second fact to reason from, so you can work towards an answer even when the name escapes you, and every explanation adds something worth repeating. Each one cites the page that establishes it. Ideal for pub quiz hosts, geography teachers and anyone who has argued about where the North begins. Play online or print it for a classroom round.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which county, containing the whole of Dartmoor, is the only one in England with two separate coastlines?
Devon
Devon faces the Bristol Channel to the north and the English Channel to the south, and the two shores never join because Cornwall takes the tip of the peninsula between them.
Q 02On which county's coast at Happisburgh were the oldest known human footprints outside Africa uncovered in 2013?
Norfolk
Norfolk's rough seas stripped the beach to reveal the prints, more than 800,000 years old, in May 2013 and washed them away within about two weeks, so they survive only as photographs and 3D scans.
Q 03Which river name, shared by the waterways through Bath, Salisbury and Evesham, comes from a Brittonic word simply meaning 'river'?
Avon
Avon comes from the Brittonic abona, 'river', the same word as the modern Welsh afon, so anyone who says 'River Avon' is really saying 'River River'.
Q 04The ending shared by Manchester, Winchester and Chester derives from castra, the Latin word for what?
A military camp
A military camp of the legions became 'ceaster' to the Anglo-Saxons, which is why most -chester, -caster and -cester towns stand on Roman sites. Lancaster and Gloucester carry the same root.
Q 05Place names ending in -by, such as Grimsby and Whitby, record villages founded by which people?
Norse settlers
Norse settlers called a village a 'by', and the ending clusters across the old Danelaw of northern and eastern England. The same word gave English 'bylaw', at first a town's own local law.
Q 06Which Suffolk village, once a port covering as much ground as 14th-century London, was mostly lost to the sea after 1286?
Dunwich
Dunwich began to go when a storm surge struck in 1286, and later storms and erosion took most of the rest. Yet the shrunken village went on sending two MPs to Parliament until 1832.
Q 07Which river is the traditional line dividing 'Kentish Men' to its west from 'Men of Kent' to its east?
Medway
The Medway also saw a national humiliation: in 1667 a Dutch fleet sailed up it to Chatham, captured the English flagship Royal Charles and towed her home across the North Sea.
Q 08Which national park, at the southern end of the Pennines, became Britain's first in April 1951?
Peak District
The Peak District was designated on 17 April 1951, three weeks ahead of the Lake District, under a 1949 Act passed after years of pressure from walkers who were shut out of private moorland.
Q 09Which shoreline from Exmouth to Studland Bay became England's first natural World Heritage Site?
Jurassic Coast
The Jurassic Coast lays bare 185 million years of rock, and at Lyme Regis in 1812 the young Mary Anning dug out an ichthyosaur skeleton that scientists argued over for years.
Q 10Which promontory near Eastbourne, rising 162 m above the sea, is the highest chalk sea cliff in Britain?
Beachy Head
Beachy Head's clifftop lighthouse, Belle Tout, was so often lost in mist that a new one was built in the sea below in 1902, and in 1999 the old tower was slid 17 m back from the crumbling edge.
Q 11Which Suffolk port's Ness Point, marked by a Euroscope direction marker, is the most easterly point of England?
Lowestoft
Lowestoft Ness is the easternmost point of the whole United Kingdom, yet visitors often leave disappointed: it lies off Gasworks Road, beside a 126 m wind turbine that was Britain's tallest when it was finished in 2005.
Q 12Which town 2.5 miles south of the Scottish border, England's most northerly, changed hands more than a dozen times?
Berwick-upon-Tweed
Berwick-upon-Tweed swung between Scotland and England for a little more than 400 years, until Richard, Duke of Gloucester, the future Richard III, retook it for England in 1482. It has stayed English ever since.
Q 13Which strait, the venue for Cowes Week and a shipping lane for Southampton, parts the Isle of Wight from the mainland?
Q 21Which motorway between London and Leeds opened in 1959 with no speed limit, crash barriers or lights?
M1
The M1 was the first motorway to link distant cities, a year after the short Preston Bypass opened. Its first stretch ran only from Watford to Rugby, and the full 193 miles to Leeds took until 1999.
Q 22Which limestone ravine in Somerset's Mendip Hills yielded Britain's oldest near-complete human skeleton in 1903?
Cheddar Gorge
Cheddar Gorge gave up Cheddar Man, who lived about 10,000 years ago. DNA drawn from his bones suggests he had dark skin, dark hair and blue or green eyes.
Q 23Which river, formed where its North and South branches meet near Hexham, reaches the North Sea at South Shields?
Tyne
The Solent
The Solent swallowed Henry VIII's warship Mary Rose during a battle with a French fleet in 1545. Her wreck was raised in 1982 and now rests in a museum at Portsmouth.
Q 14Which three chalk stacks off the Isle of Wight's western tip lost a fourth, 'Lot's Wife', to collapse in 1764?
The Needles
The Needles rise about 30 m from the sea and are thought to take their name from the needle-like Lot's Wife, which fell in a storm in 1764. A lighthouse has stood on the outermost rock since 1859.
Q 15Which 18-mile Dorset shingle bank, its pebbles graded by size from end to end, shelters the Fleet lagoon?
Chesil Beach
Chesil Beach sorts its shingle so neatly, from pea-sized at West Bay to far coarser at Portland, that fishermen landing at night were said to know where they were by the size of the pebbles.
Q 16Which royal hunting preserve in Nottinghamshire holds the Major Oak, the ancient tree declared dead in 2026?
Sherwood Forest
Sherwood Forest's Major Oak, thought to be up to 1,200 years old, failed to leaf in spring 2026 and was left standing as a monument. Legend made its hollow trunk the hideout of Robin Hood.
Q 17Which Hampshire national park, William the Conqueror's royal hunting ground, is grazed by free-roaming ponies?
New Forest
The New Forest was proclaimed a royal forest by William the Conqueror and appears in Domesday Book, yet it became a national park only on 1 March 2005. Its open heath survives because commoners' ponies, cattle and donkeys keep it grazed.
Q 18Which national park, designated in 2010 as England's newest, runs from Winchester to Eastbourne?
South Downs
The South Downs are famed for flower-rich chalk grassland, yet so much was ploughed for crops during the Second World War that it now covers only about 4% of the park.
Q 19Which national park across two West Country counties became Europe's first International Dark Sky Reserve in 2011?
Exmoor
Exmoor has a fiercer side: in August 1952 about nine inches of rain fell on the moor in 24 hours, and the flood that tore down its steep valleys into Lynmouth killed 34 people.
Q 20Which Derbyshire plateau saw about 400 ramblers stage a mass trespass in 1932 to demand the right to roam?
Kinder Scout
Kinder Scout's trespassers scuffled with gamekeepers on private moorland. Five were jailed, and the outcry over their sentences swelled public support for a right to roam.
The Tyne was once so polluted that salmon all but vanished from it, yet by 2013 the Environment Agency was calling it the best salmon river in England.
Q 24Which hills of honey-coloured oolitic limestone form England's largest Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty?
Cotswolds
The Cotswolds grew rich on medieval wool from the sheep of their hills, and merchants spent the profits on grand 'wool churches' such as the one at Chipping Campden.
Q 25Which 82-mile earthwork, traditionally ordered by an 8th-century Mercian king, roughly traces the England–Wales border?
Offa's Dyke
Offa's Dyke was raised, by tradition in the 780s, to run 'from sea to sea', each stretch seemingly dug by men from a different district. Its gaps fall where rivers and steep slopes already did the job.
Q 26Which town serves as the county town of Kent instead of the cathedral city of Canterbury?
Maidstone
Maidstone owes the role to its place at the centre of Kent: the shire's great meetings were held just outside it on Penenden Heath from the 11th century, and the county's condemned were executed there until 1830.
Q 27Which Wiltshire village stands partly inside the henge that holds Britain's largest stone circle?
Avebury
Avebury's stones were buried or broken up for building over the centuries, until Alexander Keiller, heir to a marmalade fortune, bought the site in the 1930s and stood many of them back up.
Q 28Which square-sided bay on England's east coast is said to have swallowed King John's baggage train in 1216?
The Wash
The Wash is said to have engulfed the king's wagons at a tidal crossing, and scholars still argue over whether the crown jewels went with them. John died at Newark within days.
Q 29Which 268-mile trail from Edale to Kirk Yetholm opened in 1965 as England's first National Trail?
Pennine Way
The Pennine Way was proposed by journalist Tom Stephenson in a 1935 Daily Herald article and declared open on Malham Moor on 24 April 1965. It climbs through the northern uplands to just inside the Scottish border.
Q 30Which tidal island near Penzance, reached from Marazion by causeway, was once a priory of a Norman abbey?
St Michael's Mount
St Michael's Mount belonged to the monks of Mont-Saint-Michel, its namesake across the Channel, until Henry V, at war with France, shut down priories that answered to foreign abbeys.