Guildford

Clock, almshouse and steep High Street

A gilded clock projects out over the High Street from the front of the Guildhall, hanging far enough into the air that you tend to see it before the building it belongs to. It is traditionally dated to 1683, and it remains one of the most photographed things in the town. The street beneath it is steep and paved with granite setts, and for centuries it was part of the London-to-Portsmouth coaching route, which is why the old posting houses still stand along it. There has been a market here since 1276.

At the top of the High Street is Abbot's Hospital, a Jacobean almshouse founded in 1619 by Archbishop George Abbot, who was born in Guildford. Its Tudor-style red-brick gatehouse opens onto courtyards laid out like an Oxbridge college, and it still houses residents today, four centuries after the first ones moved in on 29 October 1622. Holy Trinity Church faces it across the street.

St Mary's and the working Wey

Turn down Quarry Street and you reach St Mary's, whose flint tower was built around 1040. It is the oldest surviving piece of architecture in Guildford, predating the castle by at least seventy years. Lewis Carroll — the Reverend Charles Dodgson — occasionally preached here; his funeral was held in the church in 1898, after he died of pneumonia at his sisters' home in the town. He is buried up at the Mount Cemetery.

The River Wey runs through the middle of everything, and its towpath gives you free, level walking straight out of the centre. The Wey was one of the first English rivers made navigable, opened in 1653, and the National Trust has owned it since the 1960s. Follow it to Dapdune Wharf, where the restored barges Reliance and Perseverance IV are moored. You can board the Reliance, and dogs are allowed on leads. Adult entry is £9, children £5.50.

Castle walls and ancient yews

The castle grounds sit just above the river, pleasure gardens laid out in 1888 around a medieval keep whose walls are ten feet thick at the base.

East of the town, Newlands Corner is chalk grassland climbing to 567 feet, with 129 ancient yews, some of them over a thousand years old, and skies dark enough for astronomy. It was here that Agatha Christie's car was found abandoned during her disappearance in December 1926.

Red brick and roads outward

On Stag Hill to the north-west stands Guildford Cathedral, built between 1936 and 1961 from red brick made of clay dug out of the hill it sits on. Its architect, Edward Maufe, set out "to produce a design, definitely of our own time, yet in the line of the great English Cathedrals." Later it was a filming location for the 1976 horror film The Omen.

Trains from Guildford station, open since 1845, run direct to London Waterloo and Portsmouth, and the A3 passes the town on its way between the two. If you have a car, RHS Wisley is twenty minutes north-east and Loseley Park, an Elizabethan house built in the 1560s, is three miles south-west along quiet lanes.

The angel above Stag Hill

Above the cathedral tower, a fifteen-foot gilded angel turns as a weathervane, showing which way the wind is coming off the Downs.