St Augustine's Abbey Church

The ruins of St Augustine's Abbey Church rise from the Kent countryside just outside Birchington like a fragment of something far grander than what's left standing. What you're looking at are the remains of one of England's earliest monasteries, founded in 597 AD - literally one of the oldest Christian sites in the country. The church itself is mostly gone, but the scale of the original structure becomes apparent when you walk among the surviving stonework and imagine the scale of what once occupied this space.

It's the kind of place that works best if you've got a genuine interest in Saxon history or early Christianity. Casual visitors might find themselves here for twenty minutes, reading a few information boards, then moving on. But if you're the type who gets animated about Anglo-Saxon England, you could easily spend an hour picking through the ruins and contemplating what life looked like here fourteen centuries ago.

The site is free to access and there's no need to book ahead. Allow forty minutes to an hour depending on how much you want to absorb. The surrounding area is fairly quiet, so it's a decent stop if you're basing yourself at one of the nearby holiday parks - Sandwich Leisure Holiday Park is your closest option at five miles away and comes well-regarded for families. St Augustine's works as a half-day addition to a Kent coast holiday rather than a main draw, but for history enthusiasts with a few days in the area, it's genuinely worth the detour.