It is nearly 13 centuries since the English nation first appeared in the historical record thanks to the Venerable Bede, the monk who chronicled how the Anglo-Saxons moved to Britain and became Christian.

The country has changed almost unimaginably since then, with waves of migration, war and industrial development remaking the landscape.

But a new book reveals how some remains of the Anglo-Saxon past are hiding in plain sight – within great cathedrals, remote farms and even shabby council estates.

Henrietta Leyser, a historian at the University of Oxford, has written Beda: A Journey Through the Seven Kingdoms in the Age of Bede as a practical guide to the medieval world – highlighting the eighth-century monuments which have clung on to survival all this time.

In all corners of the seven ancient kingdoms known as the ‘Heptarchy’ – Kent, Northumbria, East Anglia, Essex, Mercia, Sussex and Wessex – it is still possible to catch a glimpse of the distant past.

Tour: This map shows the various locations in England and Scotland where Anglo-Saxon sites dating back to the eighth century can still be visited

KENT

Canterbury has been the centre of Christianity in England since 597, when St Augustine landed there on a mission from the Pope to convert the Anglo-Saxons, and it remains the home of the country’s most senior bishop.

All that remains of the Saxon city is the abbey of St Augustine’s, which the saint founded as a home for himself and the other monks he had brought with him from Rome.

Half-surrounded by the 1960s Canterbury Christ Church University, with its entrance sitting opposite a branch of Londis, the abbey is now almost totally ruined, but its sixth-century foundations are clearly visible – complete with the graves of the first five Archbishops of Canterbury.

Graves: The first five Archbishops of Canterbury are all buried in the ruined St Augustine's Abbey

Remains: These towers are all that is left from the Anglo-Saxon church at Reculver in Kent

Folkestone is best known today as an industrial port and starting point of the Channel Tunnel – but it has a surprising past as the home of what was believed to be the first nunnery in England.

Professor Leyser describes how the church of St Mary and St Eanswythe, near the town’s harbour, contains a casket thought to house the remains of St Eanswith, whose father was the king of Kent and who is said to have founded the pioneering monastic community.

The tiny village of Reculver, on the north-east coast of Kent, is dominated by a pair of giant and mysterious twin towers perched on the very edge of the shore.

The towers, while not built until shortly after the end of the Anglo-Saxon age, are the last remnants of a Roman fort which became the seventh-century church of St Mary’s.

By 1805, however, the coastline had eroded so much that the church was in danger of toppling into the sea – so the local vicar had a new church built further inland, with most of the original building being demolished and just the towers left to hint at what a grand community Reculver once was.

NORTHUMBRIA

Abercorn, near Edinburgh, is now deep within Scotland – but during the time of Bede, it was part of the kingdom of Northumbria, covering all of what is now Yorkshire, Lancashire, Cumbria, Northumberland and County Durham as well as the Scottish Borders.

The English community in the area was destroyed by the Picts in 684, forcing abbot Trumwine to abandon Abercorn. It has been part of Scotland ever since, but the local museum houses part of a monumental stone cross apparently dating back to its Anglo-Saxon past.

Ornate: The Bewcastle Cross is standing in the churchyard of an unassuming Cumbrian village; its different faces are all carved with elaborate sculpture

Surroundings: Escomb church in County Durham is situated in the middle of a small council estate

Bewcastle, which sits in Cumbria between Hadrian’s Wall and the Scottish border, was a Bronze Age settlement and a Roman fort before being occupied by the Anglo-Saxons.

In the churchyard of the small town there stands a huge stone pillar, inscribed with artworks so overwhelming that the architectural historian Nicolaus Pevsner described it – along with another similar sculpture in Ruthwell, Dumfriesshire – as ‘the greatest achievement of their date in the whole of Europe’.

The monument, once the shaft of a cross, shows sculptures of biblical figures, names written in runes which Professor Leyser claims were intended to provide a memorial for local residents, and a sundial which is one of the earliest in England.

St John’s church in Escomb, County Durham, is situated in the centre of a small council estate which provides an unprepossessing setting for one of the best-preserved Saxon buildings in England.

The church was built partly from Roman stones in the seventh century, and has remained substantially unaltered since its foundation.

Atmospheric: Lindisfarne, also known as Holy Island, was once one of England's most important monasteries

Legacy: The Lindisfarne Gospels, now in the British Library, are the best-known product of the community

Lindisfarne, also known as Holy Island, has long been considered one of the most atmospheric religious sites in Britain thanks to its relative isolation – it is nearly 50 miles from the nearest city, Newcastle – and the fact that it is cut off from the mainland by the tides for several hours every day.

The island’s monastery was set up around 635 by Aidan, an Irish monk who had been asked to bring Christianity to Northumbria.

Survival: The stained-glass window at Jarrow is made from glass which dates to the seventh century

Few traces of the Anglo-Saxon church are now left, having been largely replaced by a Norman complex, but the windswept islands still form a powerful impression of what the monastery would once have been like. Remote as it was, it was still too cosmopolitan for seventh-century bishop Cuthbert, who retreated to the nearby Farne Islands – now populated only by puffins and National Trust rangers – in order to find true solitude.

The best-known relic of Lindisfarne is the Lindisfarne Gospels, the most ornate of all Anglo-Saxon books, which was apparently written at the monastery before being taken to Durham and ending up in the British Library.

Bede himself was a monk at the monasteries of Wearmouth and Jarrow, twin communities situated six miles away from each other between the Rivers Tyne and Wear.

Remarkably, parts of the Saxon churches in both places survive to this day – Wearmouth boasts surreal carved beasts in its tower, while Jarrow’s church contains some fragments of seventh-century stained glass, which would have adorned the building back when Bede worshipped there several times a day.

But while the fabric of the churches recaptures their splendid past, the setting does not. The church at Jarrow overlooks a huge industrial facility and author Simon Jenkins advises visitors to ‘blot out the pylons, the factories and the modern estates’ if they wish to reconnect with the site’s Anglo-Saxon origins.

Grand: St Paul's Church in Jarrow is the monastery where Bede lived for nearly his whole life

Wider view: The church now overlooks the giant Tyne Car Terminal which contains hundreds of vehicles

There are few sites in England where it is possible to see traces of the pagan past which was swept away by the coming of Christianity, but Yeavering in Northumberland is one of those places.

The rise of aerial photography revealed that the green fields outside the village were once home to the palace complex of King Edwin, with multiple great halls reminiscent of the Old English epic poem Beowulf, as well as a unique ‘amphitheatre’ which would have enabled hundreds of people to watch religious ceremonies or meetings of magnates.

The skulls of dozens of oxen have been buried at the site, showing that it was used for pagan sacrifice, while Professor Leyser suggests that Yeavering was later adapted for Christian purposes, with crosses erected in the place of idols.

EAST ANGLIA

The city of Ely is to this day centred around the mighty cathedral. The present building was constructed by the Normans in the years after 1066, but it has its origins in a community founded by Aethelthryth, the wife of a Northumbrian king, in 673.

The first home of this community was long thought to be lost – but in 2006, a group of Cambridge archaeologists investigated a farm on the edge of Ely and discovered 15 graves, belonging to men, women and children, who may have been followers of Aethelthryth. Some of the dead were buried along with valuable goods such as gold, silver and glass cups, implying that they were wealthy and important figures during their lives.

The site has since been covered with more than 100 houses built to capitalise on the area’s increasing popularity with commuters.

Historic: But what was once a monastic community on the edge of Ely is now a modern housing estate

ESSEX

Barking Abbey is one of the few Anglo-Saxon sites which is easily accessible on the London Underground, being just a stone’s throw from the last stop on the Hammersmith & City Line.

The abbey – dating back to the 670s, according to Bede – was mostly destroyed during the Dissolution of the Monasteries, with just one tower remaining on a patch of green land hemmed in by main roads.

During its heyday, the community was considered the most important nunnery in England, with its members mostly aristocrats or even princesses who had rejected the secular life.

Changed: The footprint of Barking Abbey is laid out in the ground where it once stood - overlooked by a defunct Comet store and a number of roads and industrial buildings

Remote: St Peter's Chapel near Bradwell-on-Sea stands half a mile from the nearest road

In the remotest part of Essex, overlooking the North Sea, stands St Peter’s Chapel near Bradwell-on-Sea. The seventh-century building, founded by Bishop Cedd of London, is still substantially intact, although parts of it have been washed away by the sea.

The chapel stands on its own, half a mile away from the nearest road, and over the years became so neglected that it was used as a barn before being restored in 1920.

MERCIA

Breedon-on-the-Hill, in Leicestershire, seems once to have been one of the most impressive settlements in Mercia – the kingdom which covered the whole of the Midlands between the Thames and the Humber.

The church was built during Bede’s lifetime on the site of an Iron Age fort atop a large hill, offering commanding views of the countryside in all directions.

The building standing there now is entirely post-Saxon – but the architects took care to safeguard a collection of extraordinary carvings, described by one expert as ‘a stone equivalent to the Lindisfarne Gospels’, created during the eighth and ninth centuries when Mercian power was at its peak.

Majestic: Breedon-on-the-Hill stands on a hill in Leicestershire overlooking the surrounding countryside

At Repton in Derbyshire, the parish church is built above an Anglo-Saxon crypt, which dates back to the eighth century and may contain the tomb of King Aethelbald of Mercia, a fearsome warrior who extended his power over nearly all of England.

Professor Leyser suggests that the burial chamber, situated on a hill above the River Trent, could have been the Christian equivalent of a ‘barrow burial’, an Iron Age practice which saw great rulers entombed in artificial mounds allowing them to survey their lands in death.

The crypt was converted into a chapel of St Wigstan, a member of the Mercian family who was killed in a political dispute and honoured as a martyr at Repton. The later church was built around the crypt.

SUSSEX

Bosham is mentioned by Bede as the location of an monastery inhabited by an Irish monk – an intriguing suggestion, if he means the same Bosham as the modern town near Chichester, for there is no other evidence for the Irish church reaching so far south.

However, the town’s main Anglo-Saxon significance is as the port where Harold set off to Normandy in 1064 on the trip which would apparently see him pledge allegiance to William the Conqueror – setting the scene for the latter to invade England two years later, after Harold became king.

The scene, which has been hotly debated by historians, is captured in the Bayeux Tapestry, with Bosham clearly marked.

Record: The Bayeux Tapestry shows King Harold riding towards the church in Bosham, Sussex

BEDE, THE BRILLIANT MONK WHO GAVE THE ENGLISH AN IDENTITY Bede (c. 673-735) was a monk from the North of England who composed the first ever history of the English, just over a century after the coming of Christianity had brought literacy to the Anglo-Saxons. He was born in the Newcastle area and stayed there nearly all of his life, brought up from boyhood in the great monastery at Jarrow. Despite his limited experience of the world beyond his church walls, Bede was extremely well read, versed in a Latin culture which connected him to the rest of Europe, and he wrote a total of 30 books including biblical commentaries and theological treatises. He is best known for his Ecclesiastical History of the English People, an account of the coming of the Anglo-Saxons to England and the subsequent spread of Christianity. The great work is not only the first known book to treat the English – then divided among several different kingdoms – as a single unified group, but it also pioneered the practice of counting dates from the birth of Christ, as we still do today. Bede – later known as ‘the Venerable’ – died shortly after reciting an Old English poem, and his grave is now in Durham Cathedral. Advertisement

WESSEX

The port of Southampton, known in the Anglo-Saxon era as ‘Hamwic’, was one of the most prosperous settlements in England during the age of Bede.

The site, founded some time before 700, was a natural unloading place for ships coming from the Solent and heading up the River Itchen, and it was apparently built to a strict design with every house assigned its own plot and the streets laid with gravel.

Among the many far-flung imports found during archaeological works in Southampton are continental coins, French glass and tools from the Rhine – showing that Anglo-Saxon England was closely connected to Europe despite the era’s reputation as an economic Dark Age.

The most prominent city in Wessex – which took in modern-day Hampshire, Wiltshire, Dorset, Somerset and Berkshire – was Winchester, where the first cathedral was built in the 660s.

The so-called ‘Old Minster’ was the city’s main religious site in Bede’s time, but around 900 Alfred the Great and his son Edward built a ‘New Minster’ right next to it. The outline of the original church can now be seen in the grounds of the later cathedral.

Winchester Cathedral became the burial place for much Alfred’s dynasty, and caskets said to contain their bones can still be seen lining the choir of the church.