UK Counties
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50 free UK Counties trivia questions with answers — geography quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
The United Kingdom's counties are older than most of its laws. Some began as Anglo-Saxon shires, some as Norse earldoms or Welsh kingdoms, and a few were invented by an Act of Parliament in the 1970s. Each one still has something it is known for: a mountain, a cathedral city, a cheese, a royal estate or a very odd tradition. This quiz covers all four nations. You will be asked to place famous landmarks in the right county, to name county towns that are not the obvious choice, and to sort out the lakes, islands and borders that divide one county from the next. Scottish, Welsh and Northern Irish counties get their share of the questions alongside the English ones. It suits pub quiz teams, geography students, family car journeys and anyone planning a trip around Britain and Northern Ireland. Every answer comes with a short explanation, so you will leave with a few stories as well as a score.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which county faces France across the Strait of Dover and contains Canterbury, seat of England's senior archbishop?
Kent
Kent is where Saint Augustine landed in the 6th century to begin converting the English, becoming the first Archbishop of Canterbury.
Q 02Which county holds Land's End, Tintagel Castle and the vast greenhouse domes of the Eden Project?
Cornwall
Cornwall kept its own Celtic language, which died out as a community tongue at the end of the 18th century and has since been revived.
Q 03Which Scottish county, still styled a kingdom after its Pictish past, holds St Andrews, the home of golf?
Fife
Fife is home to The R&A at St Andrews, the body that governs golf everywhere in the world except the United States and Mexico.
Q 04Which County Antrim landmark of about 40,000 interlocking basalt columns became a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1986?
Giant's Causeway
Giant's Causeway was, in legend, built by the Irish hero Finn MacCool after a Scottish rival called Benandonner challenged him to a fight.
Q 05Which mountain, the highest in Wales, can be climbed by a rack railway that starts at Llanberis in Gwynedd?
Snowdon
Snowdon has carried passengers to its summit by train since 1896, on the only public rack-and-pinion railway in the United Kingdom.
Q 06Which lake, the largest in the British Isles, has shores in five of Northern Ireland's six counties?
Lough Neagh
Lough Neagh supports a centuries-old eel fishery whose catch swims some 4,000 miles from the Sargasso Sea and now holds protected status.
Q 07What name, from an Old Norse word for a third part, was given to the three historic divisions of Yorkshire?
Ridings
Ridings were treated in many ways as separate counties, each with its own quarter sessions and lieutenancy; Yorkshire's were North, West and East.
Q 08Which county gave the world Cheddar cheese, named after a village beside a gorge full of cool caves?
Somerset
Somerset's Cheddar Gorge caves gave the steady temperature and humidity that suited maturing cheese, and some cheddar is still aged in them.
Q 09Which county, called Ynys Môn in Welsh, holds the village with the longest place name in the UK?
Anglesey
Anglesey's 58-character village name was supposedly contrived in 1869 as a publicity stunt, to give its station the longest name in Britain.
Q 10Which Dumfriesshire village beside the English border became famous for runaway weddings over a blacksmith's anvil?
Gretna Green
Gretna Green's wedding trade began in 1754, when Lord Hardwicke's Marriage Act tightened the rules in England but did not apply in Scotland.
Q 11Which county holds Sandringham, the royal estate where the first royal Christmas broadcast was made?
Norfolk
Norfolk's countryside around Sandringham appealed to Princess Alexandra, the future queen, because it reminded her of her native Denmark.
Q 12Which county's resort of Southend-on-Sea has the longest pleasure pier in the world, served by its own railway?
Essex
Essex nearly lost its great pier after fires in the 1970s, but protests kept it open and Princess Anne reopened its railway in 1986.
Q 13Which small English county expects royalty and peers passing through its county town to hand over a horseshoe?
Rutland
Rutland was given a vast reservoir in the 1970s, Rutland Water, which now doubles as a nature reserve where ospreys breed.
Q 21Which county stages an annual race in which runners chase a wheel of cheese down the steep Cooper's Hill?
Gloucestershire
Gloucestershire's rolling cheese gets a one-second head start and is never actually caught, so the first runner to the bottom wins it.
Q 22Which Hampshire cathedral city, rebuilt on a new street grid by Alfred the Great, is the county town?
Winchester
Winchester Cathedral is the burial place of early kings, among them Egbert of Wessex, Canute and William Rufus.
Q 23Which Lake District peak, climbed in the National Three Peaks Challenge, is the highest mountain in England?
Scafell Pike
Scafell Pike was not known to be England's highest ground until the early 1800s, and early surveyors labelled it only as a higher top of Sca Fell.
Q 14Which county, created in 1974, holds the Lake District, England's largest national park and home of the Lake Poets?
Cumbria
Cumbria was assembled from Cumberland, Westmorland, the Furness part of Lancashire and a small slice of Yorkshire.
Q 15Which English county bordering Scotland holds the tidal Holy Island of Lindisfarne and part of Hadrian's Wall?
Northumberland
Northumberland's place on a contested border left it with more castles than any other English county, including Alnwick and Bamburgh.
Q 16Which county was the birthplace of Isaac Newton and the place where the world's first tank was built?
Lincolnshire
Lincolnshire's Woolsthorpe Manor, where Newton was born, still has an apple tree that analysis suggests is the one he described.
Q 17Which county holds Ironbridge Gorge, where the world's first major cast-iron bridge opened over the Severn in 1781?
Shropshire
Shropshire became an early centre of industry after Abraham Darby first smelted iron ore with coke at Coalbrookdale in 1709.
Q 18Which county gave its name to the largest hoard of Anglo-Saxon gold yet found, unearthed near Lichfield in 2009?
Staffordshire
Staffordshire's treasure was found by a man with a metal detector on recently ploughed farmland, and it outweighs the gold from Sutton Hoo.
Q 19Which county contains the whole of Dartmoor, the granite moorland where The Hound of the Baskervilles is set?
Devon
Devon's Dartmoor Prison at Princetown was built to hold prisoners from the Napoleonic Wars, and later held thousands of American sailors captured in the War of 1812.
Q 20Which English county is commonly given the prefix 'County', a style far more usual in Ireland?
Durham
Durham owes its unusual style to its bishops, who for centuries ruled it as a county palatine with the right to raise an army and mint coins.
Q 24What collective name is given to the ring of shires around London, such as Surrey, Hertfordshire and Berkshire?
Home Counties
Home Counties may take the name from the Home Circuit of courts that once ringed London, though the origin of the term is uncertain.
Q 25Which Dorset county town was fictionalised as Casterbridge in the novels of Thomas Hardy?
Dorchester
Dorchester still has Max Gate, the house on its outskirts that Hardy designed for himself and lived in until his death in 1928.
Q 26Which port city became the first town in England to be made a county in its own right, in 1373?
Bristol
Bristol had been divided between two neighbouring shires until Edward III's charter made the town a county of its own.
Q 27Which prehistoric monument on Wiltshire's Salisbury Plain includes bluestones hauled about 150 miles from Wales?
Stonehenge
Stonehenge's bluestones came from the Preseli Hills of west Wales, and a 2024 study traced its central Altar Stone further still, to the north-east of Scotland.
Q 28Which Derbyshire market town gives its name to a pudding of jam, egg and ground almond?
Bakewell
Bakewell's pudding is said to have begun by accident, when an inn's cook told to make a jam tart spread the egg mixture on top of the jam instead.
Q 29Which title belongs to the monarch's personal representative in a UK county, an office begun under Henry VIII?
Lord-Lieutenant
Lord-Lieutenant began as a military post: the holder raised and commanded the county militia, a duty that was removed only in 1871.
Q 30Which county at the northern end of mainland Scotland was the scene of the largest of the Highland Clearances?
Sutherland
Sutherland means 'southern land', a name given in the Viking era by Norse rulers based further north, for whom it lay to the south.