Walk the public footpaths through the rewilded scrub

Look for white storks on their nests in the oaks

Listen for nightingales in the thorn thickets in May

Look for purple emperors around the sallows in July

Charles Burrell took over 3,500 acres of heavy Sussex clay at Knepp in 1983, tried for seventeen years to make it pay, and from 2001 began letting it go: fences down, longhorn cattle, Tamworth pigs, ponies and deer left to shape the land. It is the first major lowland rewilding project in England, and it has become a nesting stronghold for nightingales, a breeding hotspot for purple emperor butterflies and the site of the first white stork chicks hatched in Britain for centuries.

Knepp: The First Big Lowland Rewilding in England

Tour Arundel Castle and climb the Norman keep

Go into the Catholic cathedral on the hill

Walk the boardwalks at Arundel Wetland Centre

Arundel Castle has been the seat of the Dukes of Norfolk for centuries, rebuilt and restored so thoroughly in the 19th century that it looks like the idea of a castle, standing over the Arun with the French Gothic Catholic cathedral, built by the same family, a short walk away on the hilltop. Below them, the Wildfowl and Wetlands Trust reserve fills the valley floor with reedbed and open water.

Arundel: The Castle, the Cathedral and the Wetland Centre

Tour the Royal Pavilion, remodelled by John Nash in Indo-Saracenic style for the Prince Regent from 1815, with its Music Room and Banqueting Room dragon chandelier

Walk Brighton Palace Pier, opened in 1899, and the beach below it

Ride Volk's Electric Railway, opened in 1883 and the oldest operating electric railway in the world

Wander The Lanes, the narrow streets of the old fishing town

John Nash transformed the Royal Pavilion for the Prince Regent from 1815, giving Henry Holland's Marine Pavilion of 1787 its Indo-Saracenic domes and minarets, with the dragon chandelier in the Banqueting Room. Brighton Palace Pier opened in 1899, and along the beach Volk's Electric Railway, opened in 1883, is the oldest electric railway still running in the world. Behind the front, the Lanes are the narrow streets of the old fishing town.

Brighton: The Royal Pavilion, the Pier and Volk's Railway

Ride the line from Sheffield Park to East Grinstead behind steam

See the locomotive sheds at Sheffield Park and the carriage works at Horsted Keynes

See the stations restored to different decades along the line

Ride the original 1960 stretch from Sheffield Park towards Horsted Keynes, the first line the volunteers reopened

The London, Brighton and South Coast Railway opened the Lewes and East Grinstead line in 1882. When it closed, a group of preservationists got trains running again over a four-and-a-half-mile stretch on 7 August 1960 — the first preserved standard gauge steam passenger railway in the world to run a regular public timetable. Volunteers of the Bluebell Railway Preservation Society still run it, from Sheffield Park up to East Grinstead, as a living museum of the Victorian branch line through to the late 1960s.

The Bluebell Railway: The First Preserved Steam Line to Run a Public Timetable

Tour and taste at Denbies Wine Estate near Dorking, England's largest single-estate vineyard by its own account

Walk the Surrey Hills village of Shere, with its Tudor cottages and the Tillingbourne stream

Climb Box Hill, the National Trust chalk hill above the Mole

Denbies, on the chalk above Dorking, bills itself as England's largest single-estate vineyard, planted on the south-facing slopes of the North Downs. Box Hill rises across the Mole with its zigzag road and the view south from the top, and Shere, a few miles west along the Tillingbourne, has its Tudor cottages and the stream running through.

The Surrey Hills: Denbies, Box Hill and Shere

Walk the rim path round the Devil's Punch Bowl

Climb Gibbet Hill and find the Sailor's Stone

Walk the line of the old A3, now returned to heath

Listen for nightjars churring over the heath on a summer evening, May to August

The Devil's Punch Bowl is a great hollow of heath and woodland east of Hindhead, nearly 700 acres of it, cut by springs into the greensand. The A3 used to run round the rim; since the Hindhead Tunnel opened in 2011 the old road has been taken up and grassed over, and the walk round the Bowl to Gibbet Hill is quiet for the first time in two centuries.

Hindhead and the Devil's Punch Bowl

Book a track day or driving experience on the circuit, kept to its 1966 layout

See Goodwood Aerodrome, the wartime RAF Westhampnett, and its statue of Douglas Bader

Come to the Revival and watch pre-1966 cars race in period

Go up to Goodwood House for the hillclimb course of 1936

The Goodwood circuit is the perimeter track of RAF Westhampnett, thrown up in the war as a relief airfield for Tangmere. The first meeting ran on 18 September 1948 under the Duke of Richmond and Gordon, and the last in 1966, when the owners refused to add chicanes to slow modern cars down — which is why the track survives in its 1966 layout. The Revival races the cars of that era on it again each year, and up at Goodwood House the hillclimb course first used in 1936 runs the Festival of Speed.

Goodwood: Racing as It Was in 1966

Walk Rock Park and find the old pump room and chalybeate spring

Walk round the ornamental lake made in the 1870s

Look at the Victorian ironwork and verandas along the streets

Visit the Radnorshire Museum for the story of the spa

Llandrindod grew into a spa town in the 19th century around springs whose healing qualities had drawn visitors since the mid-18th. In the season, between May and mid-September, people took the waters at the pump rooms in Rock Park and at the Pump House Hotel with orchestras playing, and an ornamental lake was made out of marshland in the early 1870s.

Llandrindod Wells: Taking the Waters in Mid Wales

Take the boat from Poole Quay or Sandbanks to the island

Walk the woods and find the red squirrels

Watch avocets and terns on the lagoon from the hide

Find the stone marking Baden-Powell's 1907 camp

Brownsea is the largest island in Poole Harbour and one of the few places in southern England with red squirrels, kept safe by the water. Robert Baden-Powell ran his experimental camp here in 1907, the start of Scouting, and the lagoon on the north shore holds avocets and terns.