Ride the Kent and East Sussex Railway from Tenterden to Bodiam

Walk Tenterden's wide, tree-lined high street

See the engines and the Colonel Stephens collection at Tenterden Town station

Tenterden is a Wealden market town with a broad tree-lined high street, and the Kent and East Sussex Railway runs from Tenterden Town down the Rother valley to Bodiam — one of Colonel Stephens's light railways, built on the cheap for country traffic and now preserved.

Tenterden and the Kent & East Sussex Railway

Sissinghurst, Bodiam and Tenterden

Dover

A six-night loop from Dover through Kent and East Sussex: Becket's cathedral at Canterbury, the shingle of Dungeness, the battlefield of 1066, and a last walk along the White Cliffs.

Kent and East Sussex from Dover

A week from Dover to Arundel: the White Cliffs and Canterbury Cathedral, Rye and the shingle at Dungeness, the battlefield of 1066 at Battle, then Beachy Head, the Seven Sisters and Brighton's Royal Pavilion.

Kent and Sussex: The White Cliffs to the South Downs

Walk the White Garden and climb Sissinghurst's tower to Vita's writing room

Climb Bodiam's spiral stairs to the battlements

Walk the orchard and the moat at Sissinghurst

Vita Sackville-West bought Sissinghurst in 1930 and with Harold Nicolson turned a farmstead of 'squalor and slovenly disorder' into a series of garden rooms, of which the White Garden has been particularly influential; after her death in 1962 her son Nigel Nicolson passed it to the National Trust in 1967. Twelve miles south, Bodiam was built in 1385 by Sir Edward Dalyngrigge with Richard II's licence, a quadrangular castle with no keep, sitting square in its moat.

Sissinghurst and Bodiam: A White Garden and a Moated Castle

Walk up cobbled Mermaid Street past the Mermaid Inn

Climb the Ypres Tower and look over Romney Marsh

Climb the church tower of St Mary's for the view over the roofs

Walk out to the sands at Camber across the Rother

Rye was one of the two Antient Townes of the Cinque Ports confederation, almost surrounded by the sea until the harbour silted, and it ran ships for the Crown and cargoes past the excise men. The cellars of the Mermaid Inn date from 1156, and the Hawkhurst Gang drank there openly in the 1740s; the Ypres Tower above the marsh has guarded the town since the 13th century.

Rye: Cinque Port, Smugglers' Inn and Cobbled Hill

Stand on the spot where the high altar marked Harold's fall

Walk the battlefield from the English ridge down to the Norman line

Go through the monks' gatehouse and the abbey ruins

Walk the town of Battle that grew up at the abbey gate

In 1070 Pope Alexander II ordered the Normans to do penance for the killing during the Conquest, and William began an abbey on the battlefield with the high altar of its church on the spot where Harold is said to have fallen on 14 October 1066. The abbey ruins, the gatehouse and the battlefield itself are all walkable, with the Norman and English positions marked on the slope.

Battle: Where Harold Fell

Walk among the tall black net shops on the Stade

Ride the East Hill and West Hill cliff railways

Walk the ruins of Hastings Castle on the West Hill

Go into St Clement's Caves under the West Hill

Hastings still lands its fish off the beach at the Stade, where the fleet is winched up the shingle and the tall black net shops stand in rows, built high and narrow because each stands on a tiny plot of a once-cramped beach. Two funiculars climb the cliffs on either side of the old town, and on the West Hill stand the ruins of the castle William ordered built here in 1066 and the smugglers' caves dug out of the soft sandstone below it.

Hastings: The Net Shops, the Cliff Railways and the Old Town

Ride the 15-inch gauge railway from New Romney out to Dungeness

Walk the shingle past the fishing huts to the old lighthouse

See Derek Jarman's garden at Prospect Cottage from the road

Watch seabirds at the RSPB reserve behind the point

Dungeness is a cuspate foreland of shingle, one of the largest expanses in Europe, often loosely called Britain's only desert, though the Met Office says it isn't one. Fishing boats, black tarred huts, two lighthouses and a nuclear power station stand on it, the warm-water outfall of the power station drew seabirds until the reactors shut down, and Derek Jarman made a garden of flint and driftwood at Prospect Cottage. The 15-inch gauge Romney, Hythe and Dymchurch Railway, opened in 1927, runs out to the point.

Dungeness: The Shingle Desert and the Miniature Main Line

Taste the iron-rich water of the Chalybeate Spring on the Pantiles, discovered in 1606 by Dudley, Lord North

Stroll the Pantiles, the colonnaded Georgian promenade beside the spring

Tour Scotney Castle, the moated 14th-century castle and Picturesque garden, National Trust

Dudley, Lord North, found the iron-rich Chalybeate Spring in 1606, and the colonnaded Pantiles run beside it. Out in the Weald, Scotney Castle is a moated 14th-century castle set in a Picturesque garden.