Tower of London

So here's the thing about the ravens. You've probably heard the legend — if the ravens ever leave the Tower, the kingdom will fall. It's ancient. It dates back to Charles the Second. Except... it almost certainly doesn't. The earliest known reference to captive ravens here is an illustration from eighteen eighty-three — the Victorian era, not the Restoration. The whole prophecy was probably cooked up as a morale booster during the Second World War, when all but three ravens died from bombing and stress during the Blitz. The survivors were called Gripp, Mabel, and Pauline.

But the raven connection to this spot goes deeper than Victorian myth-making. The Welsh word for raven is Bran. In Welsh mythology, the giant king Bran the Blessed ordered his followers to bury his head under the White Hill — which is exactly where this tower now stands — to protect Britain from invasion. So when you see those big black birds strutting around the green, you're looking at a story that's been layered and rewritten for maybe a thousand years.

And these birds have personalities. Raven George was formally dismissed from royal service for eating television aerials. Raven Grog went AWOL and was last spotted outside an East End pub. They hold official military ranks, they get enrolled on the strength of the garrison, and yes, they can be sacked for bad behaviour. There's a Ravenmaster — currently one of the Yeoman Warders — whose full-time job is keeping them fed, healthy, and on-site. Each bird gets about six ounces of raw meat a day, plus the occasional blood-soaked biscuit.

The Tower itself has been a royal palace, a prison, an armoury, a treasury, a zoo, and the home of the Crown Jewels. William the Conqueror started building it in ten sixty-six. Nearly a thousand years later, people are still arguing about the birds.