Days out from Martins Farm: summer

The problem with a guide to the local area is that it hands you thirty names and leaves the hard part to you. Which of these sit near each other. Which two can be done in one day without the day becoming a drive. Where do you eat, and at what hour, and does the whole thing end with a motorway or with a lane. What follows is our answer to that: three summer days from this gate, each one built as a route rather than a shortlist.

Two things before we start. Every drive time here is an approximate estimate from the top of our lane, not live routing, and the High Weald has a habit of turning ten minutes into twenty behind a tractor. And every opening time, ticket, parking arrangement and dog policy belongs to the venue, not to us — check them at the source on the morning you go. We would rather lose the sentence than publish something that stopped being true in March.

The first day goes west. Ashdown Forest is about half an hour away, six and a half thousand acres of heath and historic common, and it is best taken early, before the designated car parks fill and while the light is still low across the gorse. This is the real Hundred Acre Wood — Poohsticks Bridge below Hartfield, Gill's Lap on the ridge — and it rewards a plan no more complicated than parking somewhere sensible and walking away from the car. It is protected habitat rather than an attraction, so the Conservators' current access and parking guidance is the thing to follow.

From the forest, carry on to Wakehurst at Ardingly, Kew's wild botanic garden: five hundred acres of woodland, water and planted valley with the Millennium Seed Bank in the middle of it. It is the right shape for the middle of a hot day, because there is shade in it and a café you can sit down in, and because nobody minds if you spend two hours doing very little. Then home the long way through Royal Tunbridge Wells and down onto the Pantiles for a drink under the colonnade, which is ten minutes from our gate and therefore costs the day nothing at all.

The second day goes east, and it is the one we suggest most often. Scotney Castle is twenty minutes away: a moated fourteenth-century ruin set inside a picturesque garden, with a Victorian house above it and an estate walk around the whole thing. Go in the morning. Then Bewl Water, ten minutes on — the largest stretch of open water in the South East, with a path all the way round it and boats and bikes in season. An afternoon disappears there without anybody having to organise it.

Finish at Lamberhurst. It is a village with tables in it, it is on the way back, and it means the last leg home is twenty minutes of lane rather than an hour of anything. If the dog has come along, this is the day to do, because most of it happens outdoors and the water end of it is built for a wet retriever. Ring ahead about the dog wherever you plan to eat; that is the landlord's decision and it changes.

The third day is the long one, and it only works if you leave properly early. Sissinghurst first, for the opening hour — Vita Sackville-West's garden in rooms around a Tudor tower, and the most disciplined thing on this page. Then across to Rye for lunch: cobbles, tile-hung fronts, a church tower worth the climb, and more good tables per street than anywhere else within an hour of here. Then ten minutes on to Camber Sands for the last of the afternoon, which is miles of dune-backed sand and the only beach of that kind in East Sussex.

That is roughly an hour each way at the extremes, so it is a whole day and should be treated as one. Take the swimming things, accept that everybody will be quiet in the car coming back, and do not book anything for the evening. The Oast has an AGA and a kitchen you can cook a late supper in, which is the correct end to a beach day and considerably better than a restaurant at nine.

A word on what we have left out. There is a longer registry behind this page — Bedgebury, Penshurst Place, Hever Castle, Knole, Ightham Mote, Bodiam Castle, Groombridge Place, Haysden, Harrison's Rocks, Eridge Rocks, High Rocks, Bayham Old Abbey, Chartwell, Bateman's, Sheffield Park, Borde Hill, Standen, the Bluebell Railway, the Kent and East Sussex Railway, Hastings Old Town, Battle Abbey — and every one of them is a good day. They are not on this page because a summer day out is spoiled by being asked to contain four things. Pick one anchor, one supporting act, and one table.

The last hour of any of these belongs here. Fifteen acres of orchard and meadow, the long view over the Weald, and the cowl turning above the yard. It is the cheapest part of the day and reliably the part guests describe afterwards.