Walk the quarter-mile ropery and watch rope being laid

Go through HMS Ocelot, the Cold War submarine

See the Victorian ropery machinery and the covered slips

Find where HMS Victory was built in the old yard

The navy harboured its ships in Gillingham Water from 1550 and built a dockyard that turned out warships for four centuries, including Nelson's Victory. It closed in 1984, and 80 acres of the Georgian yard are now open: the quarter-mile ropery still making rope, the covered slips, and three historic warships in the old dry docks, including a Cold War submarine you can go through.

Chatham Historic Dockyard: The Ropery and Three Warships

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 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

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.

Royal Tunbridge Wells: The Pantiles and the Chalybeate Spring

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

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

Take a river boat from Westminster down the Thames to Greenwich, past the Tower and Tower Bridge

Board the Cutty Sark, the tea clipper built in 1869 and preserved in a dry dock at Greenwich

See the Painted Hall in the Old Royal Naval College, painted by James Thornhill between 1707 and 1726

Stand astride the historic Greenwich Meridian line at the Royal Observatory, commissioned by Charles II in 1675, and see Flamsteed House, finished in 1676

Greenwich is a river-boat ride down the Thames from Westminster. The Royal Observatory was commissioned by Charles II in 1675 on the hilltop site of Greenwich Castle, chosen by Christopher Wren, to fix the positions of the stars for finding longitude at sea; John Flamsteed was the first Astronomer Royal, and the observatory, through which the Greenwich Meridian runs, gave its name to Greenwich Mean Time. Below it the Painted Hall of the old naval hospital was painted by James Thornhill between 1707 and 1726, and 3,700 square metres of it were conserved from 2014. By the river is the Cutty Sark, built at Dumbarton in 1869, one of the last tea clippers and one of the fastest — she had only a few years in the tea trade before the Suez Canal, opened the same year, gave the route to steamships, and then carried wool from Australia.

Thames to Greenwich: Cutty Sark and the Meridian

Tour the state rooms used as Downton Abbey

See the Egyptian exhibition and the Carnarvon–Carter story

Walk the Capability Brown parkland and the Temple of Diana

Walk the Secret Garden and the monks' garden

Charles Barry rebuilt Highclere for the Earls of Carnarvon in a Jacobethan and Italianate style in the 1840s, and it became famous all over again as Downton Abbey. The 5th Earl funded Howard Carter's search for Tutankhamun and was with him when the tomb was opened; the Egyptian exhibition in the cellars tells the story of the discovery and shows the family's own Egyptian collection.

Highclere: Downton Abbey and a Tomb Full of Egypt

Walk out over Hermaness to look at Muckle Flugga lighthouse

Stand at Skaw, the northernmost settlement in Britain

Look for great skuas and puffins on the Hermaness cliffs in late spring and summer

Unst lays claim to many of the UK's most-northerly titles: Skaw is the northernmost settlement in the UK, Haroldswick has Britain's most northerly church, and the Muckle Flugga lighthouse off Hermaness, built by Robert Louis Stevenson's father and uncle and lit in 1858, is the most northerly lighthouse in the UK. At Baltasound the bus shelter is furnished with a sofa and a television, kept up by the locals after a boy called Bobby saved it from removal.