Walk the shell-lined passage to the altar chamber

Look for the patterns and guess at the symbols

See the current exhibition at Turner Contemporary by the harbour

See the Scenic Railway at Dreamland, the Grade II* listed wooden roller coaster retired in 2026

Under a Margate street runs a winding chalk passage 21m long ending in a rectangular chamber, and almost every surface of it is covered in mosaic made of about 4.6 million shells — some 190m² of it. It was rediscovered around 1835 and opened to the public in 1837, and nobody knows who made it, when, or why. Above ground, Margate has Turner Contemporary by the harbour and the Dreamland amusement park.

Margate: The Shell Grotto Nobody Can Explain

Visit Canterbury Cathedral, a UNESCO World Heritage Site where Thomas Becket was murdered on 29 December 1170, and stand under the Bell Harry Tower at the crossing

Visit St Augustine's Abbey, founded after St Augustine's arrival in 597

Visit St Martin's Church, the oldest church in continuous use in the English-speaking world

Take a punt tour on the River Stour through the city, in the warmer months

Walk under the Westgate Towers, the medieval gatehouse of about 1380

Thomas Becket was murdered in Canterbury Cathedral on 29 December 1170, and the cathedral is a World Heritage Site. St Augustine's Abbey was founded after Augustine arrived in 597, and St Martin's Church is the oldest church in continuous use in the English-speaking world. The Westgate Towers of about 1380 are the medieval gate into the city, and punts go out on the Stour.

Canterbury: Becket's Cathedral and St Martin's

Eat oysters on the beach or at the harbour market

Walk the alleys between the high street and the sea

Cycle the Crab and Winkle Way towards Canterbury

Watch the sunset from the Old Neptune on the shingle

Whitstable's native oysters were dredged from beds beyond the low water mark from Roman times until the mid-20th century; oysters are still farmed on the foreshore, and the town holds an oyster festival every September. The town runs in weatherboarded alleys between the beach and the high street, the Crab and Winkle Way follows parts of the old railway line to Canterbury, and the harbour the railway company built in 1832 is still working.

Whitstable: Oysters Off the Beach

Walk the White Cliffs of Dover from the Langdon Cliffs visitor centre along the top of the chalk cliffs, about 110m above the sea

Tour South Foreland Lighthouse, the first lighthouse to be lit by electricity, in 1858, where Marconi received the first ship-to-shore radio message in 1898

Tour Dover Castle, Henry II's 12th-century fortress, and go into the Secret Wartime Tunnels from which the Dunkirk evacuation of 1940 was directed

See the Bronze Age Boat at Dover Museum, some 3,500 years old

The White Cliffs rise about 110m above the Channel at Dover, walked from the Langdon Cliffs visitor centre. Along them, South Foreland Lighthouse was the first to be lit by electricity, in 1858, and Marconi received the first ship-to-shore radio message here in 1898, and in 1899 made the first international radio transmission from it, to France. Henry II's castle stands above the town, and from the Secret Wartime Tunnels beneath it the Dunkirk evacuation was directed in 1940; in Dover Museum is a Bronze Age boat some 3,500 years old.

Dover: The White Cliffs, South Foreland and the Castle Tunnels

Walk out along Southend Pier, 2.14km long and the longest pleasure pier in the world

Ride the pier railway, the first pier railway in the country, out to the pier head

Watch waders on the estuary mud at low tide

Southend Pier runs 2.14km (1.33 miles) out into the Thames estuary, the longest pleasure pier in the world, with its own railway along it because of the distance. The town grew as the Londoners' seaside, and at low tide waders feed on the estuary mud.

Southend: The Longest Pleasure Pier in the World

Walk the clifftop at Cap Blanc-Nez out to the edge and name five things from one spot in clear weather: the white cliffs of Dover opposite, a Calais ferry crossing between them, the shipping lane working up the strait, Cap Gris-Nez and the bay of Wissant away to the west, and the Boulonnais hills behind you to the south-east

Climb to the obelisk on the summit of Cap Blanc-Nez, raised between 1920 and 1922 to the Dover Patrol and to the French and British sailors together who held the strait through the First World War, and from its foot find the bunkers of the next war a few steps away and the bomb craters still dented into the turf around them

Stand on Cap Gris-Nez, the closest point of France to England, and compare the rock under your boots with the cliff you were on earlier: grey clay and sandstone about 160 million years old here, white chalk only 90 million years old at Blanc-Nez, which is why one cape is the colour of Dover and the other is not

On the south-west flank of Blanc-Nez find the paved letters laid into the ground spelling « Gloire à Marie Médiatrice », each one about seven metres tall and the two lines running some sixty metres, made to be read from the air — then look inland at the Fond Pignon basin, thirty hectares behind a dyke 35 m high holding the 5.3 million cubic metres of blue chalk slurry the French team dug out of the Channel Tunnel

Walk the clifftop turf slowly and find the sea kale growing in it — the wild ancestor of every cabbage, sprout and cauliflower you have ever eaten — then rub the oregano and thyme underfoot, on the only stretch of chalk grassland that meets the sea anywhere on this coast

The Grand Site des Deux Caps, labelled a Grand Site de France since 2011 and extended from eight to eighteen communes in 2025, takes its name from two headlands 10.9 km apart facing England: Cap Gris-Nez, the point of the French coast closest to England, and Cap Blanc-Nez, chalk cliffs rising more than 130 m above the shore — and nearer 150 by the Conservatoire du littoral's reckoning — from which, in clear weather, the cliffs of Dover can be seen across the strait. Between them lie the dunes of the bay of Wissant. It takes about 2.5 million visitors a year.

The Grand Site des Deux Caps: Cap Blanc-Nez and Cap Gris-Nez

Walk right round Rodin's Burghers on the place du Soldat Inconnu and tell the six apart by what they are doing: Jean d'Aire upright with the keys of the town clenched in both hands, Andrieu d'Andres with his head buried in his hands, and Jean de Fiennes, the youngest, bare-chested with his arms open

At the Cité de la dentelle on the quai du Commerce, time your visit for a demonstration and watch a Leavers loom actually running — the machine type that came over from England to Calais in 1816 and made the town the lace capital — then follow the upstairs room that takes one length of lace from the first sketch to the shop

Climb the 271 steps of the Calais lighthouse, and from the lantern gallery pick out the 13th-century Tour du Guet in the streets below — the tower that burned a fire on its top for sailors until this lighthouse took the job over in 1848

Look up at the belfry of the town hall behind the Burghers, on the UNESCO list since 2005, and find the joins in a building begun in 1911, stopped by the war in 1914 and only finished in 1925 — built in reinforced concrete behind its Flemish brick

In front of Calais town hall stands the first bronze of Rodin's Burghers of Calais, unveiled on 3 June 1895. It shows six men of the town who, after eleven months of siege, walked out to Edward III in August 1347 barefoot in their shirts with ropes round their necks and the keys of the town in their hands, expecting to be executed; Froissart, who told the story, was writing at the English court, and documents of Edward III found in London in the 18th century show Eustache de Saint-Pierre still alive in Calais and in the king's favour, so the heroism is as much Froissart's and Rodin's making as history's. The Cité internationale de la dentelle et de la mode, inaugurated on 11 June 2009 in the Boulart lace factory, which worked until 2000, tells the story of the town's lace industry, and the lighthouse of 1848 has 271 steps to its lantern.

Calais: Rodin's Burghers, the Lace Museum and the Lighthouse of 271 Steps

Walk the towpath the length of the 29 locks

Watch a narrowboat work through the sixteen-lock straight

Look at the side pounds built to hold the water

Walk into Devizes along the canal from the top lock

John Rennie's answer to the hill outside Devizes was a flight of 29 locks rising 72m in 3.2km on the Kennet and Avon Canal — the sixteen in the straight line up the slope are a scheduled monument. They were the last part of the 87-mile canal between Bristol and Reading to open, in 1810, and a boat takes five or six hours to work the whole flight.