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Michael Portillo takes to the rails to explore one of Britain’s oldest surviving landscapes, the woods and pasture of the Weald in south east England. Between the chalk hills of the North and South Downs, little more than an hour’s rail journey from London, he finds the pretty 12th-century church of St Peter and St Paul in Wadhurst, where more than 30 iron memorial slabs bear witness to the Weald as once the country’s leading producer of iron.

At Bedgebury Pinetum, Michael finds the largest collection of conifers in the world, with over 12,000 individual trees. One of them represents the most staggering botanical discovery of the 20th century – thought to be extinct, this tree flourished at the time of the dinosaurs. Close to Frant, Michael is drawn to a masterpiece of Georgian architecture - Finchcocks, where amateur and professional pianists come to play some of the finest pianos in the world.