Hungerford, Berkshire: Behind all the top hats and ales, Hocktide is more than just a re-enactment of local folklore

The knobbly pollarded street trees along Hungerford’s broad rural high street are maypoled with ribbons. It’s quietish, as usual. But at intervals, a small crowd in top hats, carrying oranges, baskets and beribboned poles of yellow and blue flowers, emerges from each house and enters another in turn.

The pebbledashed frontage of two cottages conceals the two halves of a medieval cruck house, its pre-chimney beams smoke-blackened: a house that’s witnessed this ceremony each of its 575 years. Each neighbour retains grazing rights on the town’s common, due to the historical tenacity of the people here. This colourful spring pageant – coinciding with the first swift over the rooftops – is Tutti Day, the near-culmination of a fortnight’s Hocktide ceremonies, a celebration and a reaffirmation of the townspeople’s common rights.

It’s been eight years since I started, and I’m now 44 metres in. It’s taken its toll

I first set eyes on the Bayeux tapestry thanks to a wrong turn. My husband was driving us across France, missed an exit, and we accidentally ended up in the town of Bayeux.

I live in Wisbech, Cambridgeshire, but having grown up in Sweden, I’d only been vaguely aware of the tapestry. I knew 1066 was a significant date for the English, but history lessons had bored me at school. I’d always had a love of needlework, though – my grandmother taught me to embroider – so we decided to see it.

Visiting such ancient places is a privilege that often makes living in them miserable – it’s only fair that tourists pay for their upkeep

Venice has had enough. It is sinking beneath the twin assaults of tourism and the sea and believes the answer lies in fending off visitors by charging them to enter . It is not alone. Tourism is under attack. Seville is charging for entry to the central Plaza de España. In Paris, the Mona Lisa is so besieged by flashing phones she is about to be banished to a basement . Barcelona graffiti shout , “Tourists go home, refugees welcome.” Amsterdam wants no more coach parties, nor does Rome .

The Venice payment will be complicated . It will apply at specific entry points only to day trippers to the city centre, not hotel guests. It will be a mere five euros and confined to peak times of day over the summer. This will hardly cover the cost of running it. It is a political gesture that is unlikely to stem the tourist flow round the Rialto and St Mark’s Square, let alone leave more room for Venetians to enjoy their city undisturbed by mobs.

Simon Jenkins is a Guardian columnist

English Heritage hopes new entrance at Grime’s Graves will mean more people can explore neolithic site

Nine metres below the grass level of an undulating Norfolk field, at the bottom of a very deep hole, Jennifer Wexler is talking about what makes this subterranean space particularly special.

“I’ve spent a lot of time crawling around [down here], and you can go into certain spaces where you see someone’s tool and think: someone just put that down 4,500 years ago, and it’s still here,” she says.

Tired of colonial artefacts being hoarded, Chidi Nwaubani and Ahmed Abokor use tech to redistribute them from museums in audacious digital heists

In March last year, two men in tracksuits, wearing hockey masks and carrying matching laundry bags, headed for the British Museum. Just outside, patrolling police asked the two strange-looking men where they were going. “We’re going to the British Museum to loot back stolen goods,” one of them said. “Well, we’ll see you in there then!” the policewoman answered.

But no arrests were made, as nothing incriminating happened. What did take place was a “digital heist” of one of the most famous objects in the British Museum, an artefact that is, according to Egyptologist Monica Hanna, “a symbol of western cultural power” and “of British imperialism”: the Rosetta Stone.

Stretch of King Charles III path on Isle of Wight held up over concerns about crown’s ‘priceless collection’

The long-awaited completion of the 2,704-mile King Charles III coastal path around England is being held up by security concerns about a collection of Queen Victoria’s belongings in the seaside grounds of a former royal palace.

English Heritage is refusing access to the grounds of Osborne House, a summer home built for Queen Victoria and Prince Albert in 1851, located on a stretch of the coast of the Isle of Wight between East Cowes and Wootton Bridge.

Day-trippers will have to pay €5 to visit Italian city under scheme designed to protect it from excess tourism

Authorities in Venice have been accused of transforming the famous lagoon city into a “theme park” as a long-mooted entrance fee for day trippers comes into force.

Venice is the first major city in the world to enact such a scheme. The €5 (£4.30) charge, which comes into force today, is aimed at protecting the Unesco world heritage site from the effects of excessive tourism by deterring day trippers and, according to the mayor, Luigi Brugnaro, making the city “livable” again.

Painting by Graham Sutherland is being displayed at Blenheim Palace before being auctioned in June

An intimate study of Winston Churchill that has been in private hands for seven decades has gone on show in the room at Blenheim Palace in which Britain’s most famous prime minister was born, before being auctioned in June.

It was the work of Graham Sutherland, one of the most highly regarded artists of his time. Sutherland was commissioned to paint Churchill by the Houses of Parliament to mark the wartime leader’s 80th birthday in November 1954.

Sutherland’s portrait of Churchill will be on public view at Blenheim Palace from 16-21 April, and at Sotheby’s in London and New York before its sale.

Archaeologists and guides among critics who say scheme goes against what symbol of democracy should represent

Jackie and Malcolm Love stood amid a bevy of tourists in the heart of Athens taking in the Acropolis with a mixture of awe and admiration. The Greek capital’s greatest classical site was truly magnificent, they said, but the crowds had been such, even in April, that they preferred to experience it from a distance.

“We didn’t go, not with all those people,” said Jackie, looking up at the fifth-century monument from the cobbled boulevard below. “We didn’t think it’d be the best thing to do, did we?” she said, nudging her husband.