Britain's public heritage body has published its list of the most "fascinating" places of 2016. And a surprisingly large number of them have links to the nation's ancient Christian heritage. 

Historic England has registered more than 1000 new places as "listed" this year, one of the ways that English sites and buildings of architectural and other special interest are safeguarded for the future.

Most churches and cathedrals are already listed.

But while some of the new listings are purely secular curiosities - such as Crimean war gunboat sheds and six Victorian lamp posts - many of the new listings still contain sites of Christian or other religious interest. One is a pre-Christian Bronze Age funerary barrow in Greenwich, London. 

The National Heritage List for England, launched in 2011, is a statutory list of all designated historic places. It includes listed buildings and scheduled monuments and already has 400,000 listed buildings.

Roger Bowdler, listing director at Historic England, said the aim was for the nation's best "weird and wonderful" to continue to be enjoyed and understood for future generations.

The 21 "most fascinating" of 2016 include Britain's oldest water chute at Wicksteed Park in Kettering, Northamptonshire. Built in 1926, its designer, philanthropist Charles Wicksteed, was the son of a well-known dissenting Unitarian preacher, also called Charles Wicksteed.

The Clayhall Royal Naval Cemetery Chapel at Gosport, Hampshire has been listed Grade II. It contains graves and memorials of men who died in the many naval campaigns, conflicts, accidents and tragedies of the 19th and 20th centuries. There is also an unusual enclosed Turkish burial ground containing the remains of 26 Turkish sailors who died from cholera whilst anchored off the Hardway, Gosport in 1850.

Also listed Grade II is the 1867 gothic-style Leighton Family tomb at St Mary's, Harrow on the Hill in London. It was Designed by John Leighton, a well-known Victorian book designer and illustrator.

In the City of London, the list includes a war memorial at St Michael's Cornhill to more than 2,100 City workers who volunteered to serve in World War I. More than 170 of them died. 

War memorial to 2130 City of London employees, St Michael's Alley, Cornhill, London

There is also a small, rare Jewish Mortuary Chapel in Norwich, Norfolk

And near Hinton Priory in Bath, Somerset, Historic England has listed the archaeological remains of 13th century monastic buildings that belonged to the Carthusians, an enclosed religious order that believed in total withdrawal from society with monks living alone in individual cells.