Look up at the House in the Clouds from the Meare

Row on the Meare, the shallow boating lake dug in 1913

See Thorpeness windmill that pumped the water up

Thorpeness was built as a mock-Tudor holiday village, and in 1923 its water tower was dressed up as a weatherboarded house so it would fit in — a 50,000-gallon tank hidden behind windows and gables, apparently floating above the trees. Anti-aircraft fire hit it by accident in the Second World War, and when mains water arrived in 1977 the tower became redundant; in 1979 the tank was taken out to make more rooms.

The House in the Clouds: A Water Tower in Disguise

Watch avocets at RSPB Minsmere, where the species returned to breed in Britain in 1947

Walk Aldeburgh's shingle beach to Maggi Hambling's steel Scallop sculpture, made in 2003 as a tribute to Benjamin Britten

Take the ferry from Orford Quay to Orford Ness National Nature Reserve, the shingle spit that was a secret military test site until the 1970s, and see its pagodas

Climb Orford Castle, the Henry II keep built in 1165–1173

Avocets returned to breed in Britain in 1947 at Minsmere, now the RSPB's reserve. On Aldeburgh's shingle beach stands Maggi Hambling's steel Scallop of 2003, a tribute to Benjamin Britten. At Orford, Henry II's keep was built in 1165–73, and a ferry crosses from the quay to Orford Ness, a shingle spit that was a secret military test site until the 1970s, with its pagodas still standing.

The Suffolk Coast: Minsmere, Aldeburgh and Orford Ness

Play the handmade machines in the Under the Pier Show

Walk the front past the painted beach huts

Look up at the lighthouse standing in the middle of the town

Take the rowing-boat ferry across the Blyth to Walberswick in summer, or cross by the Bailey Bridge upstream

Southwold sits between the sea and the mouth of the Blyth, with a white lighthouse standing among the houses, rows of painted beach huts along the front, and a pier that holds the Under the Pier Show, a hall of handmade, gently satirical arcade machines built by Tim Hunkin. Adnams has brewed here since the 19th century and is still the town's largest employer.

Southwold: The Pier, the Lighthouse and the Beach Huts

Visit Sutton Hoo, the Anglo-Saxon burial ground where Basil Brown uncovered the ship burial in 1939

Walk out to the burial mounds above the River Deben

See the reconstruction of the burial chamber and the replica finds in the exhibition hall

Walk the estuary path along the Deben below the mounds

Under a mound above the Deben, Basil Brown found the print of a 27m ship in the sand in 1939, with a burial chamber most likely made for an East Anglian king, probably Rædwald — helmet, shoulder clasps, gold buckle, silver from Byzantium — one of the most significant archaeological finds ever made in England. The ship itself had rotted away, leaving only its shape and its rivets.

Sutton Hoo: The Ship Burial Under the Mounds

Walk along the mere from Diss Park and out over the water on the boardwalk

Walk the timber-framed streets up to St Mary's church

Walk a stretch of the Waveney valley below the town

Diss is built round a six-acre mere whose origin nobody knows for sure, perhaps a glacial hollow, perhaps a sunken pocket in the chalk; the town slopes down to it in timber and Georgian brick, and John Betjeman made a short film about it, Something about Diss, in 1964. The Waveney runs along the valley below towards the Broads.

Diss and the Waveney Valley

Walk Dedham, the village in Dedham Vale National Landscape, and see St Mary's church, whose tower appears in Constable's paintings

Visit the Munnings Art Museum at Castle House in Dedham, the home of the painter Sir Alfred Munnings

Walk a section of the Stour Valley Path, the 60-mile route through the valley

Dedham is the village at the heart of Dedham Vale, and the tower of its church, St Mary's, appears in John Constable's paintings. The painter Sir Alfred Munnings lived at Castle House, now the Munnings Art Museum. The Stour Valley Path runs 60 miles through the valley.

Dedham: Constable's Church and the Munnings Museum

Stand in front of Flatford Mill, where Constable painted The Hay Wain, and find Willy Lott's Cottage across the water

Work out which bank is Suffolk and which is Essex — the Stour is the county line

Visit Bridge Cottage beside the mill, owned by the National Trust with the mill and Willy Lott's Cottage

Walk up to East Bergholt, where Constable was born, and find the wooden bell cage of 1531 in St Mary's churchyard

Flatford Mill on the Stour, in Dedham Vale on the Suffolk–Essex border, was owned by John Constable's father, and the mill and its surroundings are the setting of many of his paintings. Its date-stone says 1733; the National Trust owns it, with Bridge Cottage, Valley Farm and Willy Lott's Cottage, and the Field Studies Council has run it as a field centre since 1943. The Hay Wain, finished in 1821 and now in the National Gallery, was painted from the front of the mill, with Willy Lott's Cottage on the far left — and because the river is the county boundary, the left bank in the picture is Suffolk and the right is Essex. Constable was born up the hill in East Bergholt, whose church has never had a tower: work on one stopped when Cardinal Wolsey fell in 1530, and the next year a wooden bell cage was put up in the churchyard as a temporary home for the bells. It is still there, and the bells in it are rung by turning the headstocks by hand rather than with ropes.

Constable Country: Flatford Mill and The Hay Wain

Walk the full length of the caves to the inner chamber

Cross the underground stream called the Styx

Climb to St Lawrence's church with its golden ball

Walk round the open hexagonal mausoleum on the hill

From 1748 Sir Francis Dashwood had a network of chalk and flint tunnels dug about a quarter of a mile into the hill above West Wycombe, giving work to villagers after failed harvests and a meeting place to the Hellfire Club. The caves run directly beneath St Lawrence's church and the hexagonal mausoleum he also built, and end at an underground chamber across a stream called the Styx.

The Hellfire Caves: Dashwood's Tunnels Under West Wycombe

Walk the show caves along the underground Axe

Watch a paper-making demonstration at the mill

Look at the cheese maturing in the cave temperature

The River Axe runs out of the limestone at Wookey Hole through a series of chambers that have been open to visitors since 1927, with the stalagmite known as the Witch of Wookey in the first of them. A mill has worked the resurgent water since Domesday, and the paper mill, founded about 1610 and the oldest surviving handmade paper mill in Britain, now shows paper-making as a museum demonstration; the constant cool of the caves is used to mature Cheddar cheese.