Rye

Where to stay in Rye largely comes down to how much of the cobbled old town you want on your doorstep. Base yourself on or around Mermaid Street and the High Street and you can leave the car behind entirely, walking to the church, the museum, the antique shops and the best restaurants within minutes. This is the setting most visitors picture when they think of Rye, and its historic inns and guesthouses, several occupying genuinely old timber-framed buildings, deliver that atmosphere directly, though rooms can be compact and stairs steep in keeping with their age.

Just beyond the old town walls, around the railway station and the roads leading out towards Playden and Northiam, accommodation tends to be a little more spacious and better suited to arriving by car, with easier parking and a short, flat walk back into the centre. This area suits visitors who want to explore further afield, whether that is Romney Marsh, Bodiam Castle or the Kent and Sussex countryside, without sacrificing easy access to Rye itself. Families or those travelling with a car often find this the more practical choice, particularly in peak summer when the old town's narrow streets and limited parking can feel constricted.

For a stay that leans towards the coast rather than the town, Camber, a short drive or cycle to the east, puts the long sandy beach of Camber Sands within easy reach, along with its dunes and watersports. It suits anyone prioritising beach time over historic streets, with Rye remaining an easy day trip rather than a doorstep attraction. Whichever base you choose, distances in and around Rye are small enough that no option puts the town's main sights more than a short journey away, so the choice comes down to atmosphere and convenience rather than practicality.

Rye rewards slow exploration on foot; nearly everything of interest lies within its compact, walkable old town.

• Mermaid Street is the most photographed cobbled street in Sussex, lined with fifteenth and sixteenth century timber-framed houses leading up from the quay.
• Lamb House, cared for by the National Trust, was home to Henry James and later E.F. Benson, and its walled garden is a peaceful spot away from the crowds.
• Ypres Tower and Rye Castle Museum occupy a thirteenth-century fort that has served as a prison and mortuary as well as a lookout, with displays on the town's smuggling past.
• St Mary's Church has one of the oldest working church clocks in the country and a tower well worth the climb for the view over the marsh.
• Rye Art Gallery shows changing exhibitions of local and national work across two sites in the town centre.
• Camber Sands, a few miles east, is the largest sandy beach in East Sussex, backed by dunes and popular for kitesurfing and long walks.
• Rye Harbour Nature Reserve covers shingle, saltmarsh and lagoons along the estuary, an important site for breeding and wintering birds.
• The Landgate, the last surviving town gate of the four that once guarded Rye, still spans the road into the old town and makes a good starting point for a walking tour.

Rye Bay is known for its scallops, landed by the town's small day-boat fleet and celebrated each February with a dedicated scallop week of special menus across local restaurants. Romney Marsh lamb, grazed on the salt marshes just outside town, appears widely on menus alongside other local produce, and the surrounding orchards supply cider and apple juice to several pubs.

The town's historic inns double as its best-known dining rooms: the Mermaid Inn's restaurant sits beneath sixteenth-century beams reputedly linked to the Hawkhurst smuggling gang, while the George in Rye pairs its Georgian coaching-inn setting with a more contemporary kitchen. Webbe's at the Fish Café and Landgate Bistro are long-standing local favourites for seafood and modern British cooking respectively, and a scattering of tea rooms along the High Street and Mermaid Street serve cream teas to the steady flow of day visitors.

A farmers' market held regularly in the town centre brings together local growers, cheesemakers and bakers, and several independent delicatessens and wine merchants in the old town make it easy to put together a picnic for the beach or the nature reserve.

Camping around Rye means camping on the edge of Romney Marsh and the Sussex coast rather than in the town itself, which has no sites within its historic core. The dominant feature of the landscape here is flatness: reclaimed marshland, grazing meadows criss-crossed by drainage dykes, and long views that make the area feel more exposed to weather than the wooded Weald a few miles inland. Sites tend to cluster either right on the coast at Camber, where dunes provide some shelter from onshore winds, or a few miles inland around villages such as Ewhurst Green and Northiam, where hedgerows and slightly higher ground offer a calmer pitch.

Weather on this stretch of coast is typically drier than much of England, sitting in one of the sunnier corners of the south east, though the flat, open terrain means wind off the Channel can be a factor at coastal sites, particularly outside the summer months. Wild camping has no general legal right in England outside a handful of upland areas such as Dartmoor, and Romney Marsh and the land around Rye do not fall into any of those exceptions, so camping here means using a licensed site rather than pitching independently on the marsh or beach.

Late spring through to early autumn is the best window for camping around Rye, when the marsh birdlife at Rye Harbour is most active, the beach at Camber is at its most usable, and site facilities and shops are running at full capacity. May and June tend to be quieter than the school holiday peak of late July and August while still offering long daylight hours and settled weather, and September can be a particularly good month, with warm days, thinner crowds and the Rye Bay scallop season not far off.