Hidden Villages

Penelope begins her journey with a trip to East Anglia. While there, she attends a regatta on the Norfolk Broads, takes to the skies over the village of Little Snoring, learns to speak like a native of the county and attends a fete - complete with a performance by wheelbarrow display team the Red Sparrows.

In this episode, Penelope travels to the industrial heartlands of north-west England and north Wales, where she explores a Victorian garden in the shadow of a nuclear power plant, finds out about burgeoning tourism in Snowdonia, and goes to her first music festival.

Penelope concludes her first trip with visits to Dorset, Somerset and Wiltshire, where she sees villages that have been used on film and TV. These include the community where To the Manor Born was filmed, and the setting of Steven Spielberg's War Horse, Castle Combe, where she also discovers a motor racing circuit.

Penelope is in Devon and Cornwall - a land of rugged coastal communities and distinct identities forged over centuries, but also a region visited by five million people each year. She finds ancient traditions are being kept alive and travels to a former silver mining village, a cliff-edge fishing village, the most exposed theatre in the country, and the small communities near Fowey Harbour.

The actress learns about life in the renowned landscape of Cumbria. The wonder of the Lake District cannot be ignored, but from Morecambe Bay to the Pennines, Penny finds there is more to life in a Cumbrian village than tourists and tea shops. She meets a community buying its local mountain, indulges in the unique Cumbrian pursuit of hound trailing and visits the home of Sticky Toffee Pudding.

Penelope travels through Royal Deeside, a remote part of Aberdeenshire. Penelope explores how important Queen Victoria was in shaping modern Deeside. She takes to the skies in a glider, visits the station built for Queen Victoria in the 1860s, goes to the Highland Games arena for the first time since the 1950s and discovers the secrets of the present Queen's vegetable patch at Balmoral.