The first evening is the easiest to get right, because the answer is not to drive anywhere. Frant sits on the ridge above the farm: a green, a church tower, a pub and enough of a shop to rescue a forgotten pint of milk. The George is a ten-minute walk down the lane, or two minutes in the car if the weather has opinions, and most guests never go further on the first night. We think they are right. If The George is full, the Abergavenny Arms is on the Frant road and takes a table booked properly in advance.
Saturday morning belongs to Royal Tunbridge Wells, ten minutes north. It is a spa town that has kept its manners — Georgian frontages, independent shops, a good bookshop or two — and the Pantiles at the bottom of the hill is the reason it exists: a colonnaded promenade built around the chalybeate spring that made the town’s name. Go on a weekday morning if your weekend allows it, coffee in hand, before the shops fill.
Then choose one thing and do it properly. Scotney Castle is twenty minutes east — a moated ruin in a picturesque garden, and the best short outing on our list with children and a dog in tow. Bayham Old Abbey is almost on the doorstep, Premonstratensian ruins in a river valley and rarely crowded. If gardens are the point of the trip, Sissinghurst is Vita Sackville-West’s garden in rooms and Great Dixter at Northiam is Christopher Lloyd’s — exuberant, opinionated planting and a nursery that will cost you money. Penshurst Place, a medieval hall in the Eden valley, is half an hour north.
Check opening times, ticketing and whether dogs are welcome before you set off. The seasons change all three, and we would rather you rang ahead than trusted a paragraph.
Saturday dinner is worth booking. Thackeray’s occupies a tile-hung seventeenth-century house on London Road and is the town’s long-standing occasion restaurant; book well ahead for a Saturday. Sankey’s does fish and shellfish unfussily, which is the kind of dinner that repairs a wet afternoon.
Sunday can go one of two ways. Either it is a wine day — Bluebell Vineyard Estates is Sussex Weald sparkling and closest to home, Domaine Evremond is Champagne Taittinger’s Kent estate, and Rathfinny sits above Alfriston on the South Downs for those willing to make a drive of it — or it is a slow one. Fuller’s farm shop at Bunny Lane is a few minutes from the top of our lane, with a butchery counter and locally sourced provisions: the makings of a last lunch rather than a weekly shop.
Whichever you pick, leave the last hour for the estate itself. Fifteen acres of orchard and meadow, long views over the Weald, and the cowl on the oast turning above the yard. Guests stay in The Oast; the rest of the ground is part of the stay.
People ask what Frant is actually like, usually meaning: is there anything there. It is a ridge village of about fifteen hundred people, sandstone and tile-hung, arranged around a long green with the church of St Alban at one end and the pub near the other. There is a shop and post office, a primary school, a cricket square that takes itself seriously, and a view south over the Weald that is the real reason the village sits where it does. What there is not is a high street, a supermarket or anything resembling nightlife, which is either the drawback or the entire point depending on the weekend you had in mind.
For those coming without a car, Frant station is on the Charing Cross line and Tunbridge Wells station is in the town. Everything else on this page assumes wheels, and we would not pretend otherwise; the car-free version of the same weekend is written out properly elsewhere.
The first evening is the easiest to get right, because the answer is not to drive anywhere.