Heritage farm attraction Kent Life has created a world for us to step back into a rural past and have fun at the same time. Helen Geraghty and daughters Rebecca, 12 and Tiffany, nine, took a look.

It’s a steaming hot day and down at the old farmyard at Kent Life Farmer Phil has just been in the original milking parlour to make sure the rabbits have all got plenty of water to drink.

With half an hour to the next Cuddle Corner session, the rabbits, together with guinea pigs and hens know they will soon be earning their keep by allowing a collection of youngsters to stroke, cuddle and generally possess them for a few carefully monitored moments.

The very tame ferrets won’t be far away either, if anyone wants to stroke them. One of them, Monkey, a small female ferret is having a phantom pregnancy and, weirdly keeps trying to pick up all the other fully grown ferrets in her mouth and take them back to her nest. That’s enough to make any ferret grumpy on a hot day.

Guarded by Gordon the goose, who sleeps on a floating island in the duckpond, this farmyard has been here for hundreds of years. Safe inside, the calves are wisely enjoying the shade of their thick walled cowshed.

Patricia, the saddleback pig who likes to eat her dinner out of your hand, is looking after her chubby offspring. The piglets, in deep straw are in a relentless rotation of chasing her for milk, tiddling, snuffling and, only very briefly, sleeping.

A favourite here is feeding the goats with pellets that you can buy for £1 a bag at the door. We noticed how timid a lot of the children were of these at first, evidently completely unused to being so close to farm animals.

It was good to see them pluck up courage, then finally have to take charge and wrestle with the marauding goats to stop them from eating the paper bag too.

Some 20 lambs have been born here this year and now there’s even some quails, whose eggs are sold in the shop. Even these little scraps of feathers have something to teach you. Did you know a group of quails is called a covey?

Farmer Phil, better known as livestock officer Phil Loveland, said: “This part of Kent Life is the original farm buildings and just beside the farmyard is the original Sandling Farmhouse. We are very lucky to have this here."

My children loved the animals and the adventure playground, but I eventually managed to get them up towards what they call the “vintage village”. If you’ve never been, this is very strange thing, where an old chapel, an old village hall, shops and homes, no longer welcome in their previous sites, have been literally moved, rebuilt and preserved on this new safe place. That’s a real labour of love.

We all headed first into Lenham Cottages, 16th century cottages brought here from Lenham Heath in 1999. They were escaping a future sandwiched between the M20 and the Channel Tunnel rail link and I expect they breathed a sigh of relief to be put here on the hillside.

They have been furnished and laid out as they would have been in the Second World War, with the windows covered in criss-cross patterns to stop glass from becoming killer shards in the event of a bomb dropping nearby.

There’s an Anderson air raid shelter in the garden and gas masks in the bedrooms.

The children, who have learned about the war at school, looked long and hard at these houses, imagining what it must have been like for a little girl to live here, never knowing if a huge bomb is about to blow you all to kingdom come.

Tiffany wanted to know if my mother had kept her ugly old gas mask after the war and it suddenly struck me that in reality many people who really lived like this never wanted to think about it ever again.

In quiet moments in and around these old buildings, when you aren’t thinking about anything much, you suddenly begin to feel a bit like you are at home. We were getting quite at home at Lenham Cottages. When a string of seven toddlers, unbelievably still with ice creams in their hands, raced noisily up the narrow stairs, then turned on their heels and disappeared in an instant we felt as if we had been burgled.

We were all starving by now. Rebecca, 12, refused to sit inside 1950s-styled Dotty’s tea rooms, which she unreasonably criticised as “old looking”. They were indeed, with carefully displayed vintage crockery and knitted tea cosies. Huge sash windows were thrown wide open, letting in plenty of air and beautifully framing the lush gardens below.

Rebecca did, however, enjoy a sausage in a bun, £3.95. I mention this because she has been known to turn away sausages on the grounds that they are “too sausagey”.

Other items on the menu include brie, apple and walnut salad or Kentish oastman’s platter, both at £5.95. There are some children’s meals, cheesy beans on toast at £2.50 and sausage and mash, or a lunchbox, both at £3.25.

There is so much to see and do at Kent Life that one day isn’t really enough.

It is the sort of place where, having been there with a number of children, you might want to come back with maybe just one of them, or a grandma, and have a good look around the kitchen gardens and further afield. My own mother, certainly, would spend hours poking around in the old houses, reminiscing and showing the children how she used to live as a child during the war. My dad would say: “What do they want to dig up all this old junk for?”

But it is that atmosphere of the past they are most trying to create, a time when we had time to “stand and stare” just like in the poem by WH Davies.

And I reckon if people actually begin to feel at home when they are walking around here, then maybe that means that at last they’ve cracked it.

Kent Life's summer calendar

Party nights – late opening sessions with a barbecue run until 9pm on Wednesday, August 22 and Wednesday, August 29. Standard admission applies and there is no need to book. Last admission is 8pm.

A 1950s retro holiday camp with a beach, water zorbing and bouncy castle runs until Monday, September 3.

The Hops ‘n’ Harvest Festival is on Saturday, September 8 and Sunday, September 9, with a weekend of live music, including Kent bands, real ales and ciders.

Kent Life is at Lock Lane, Sandling, Maidstone and is just off junction 6 of the M20. It is open every day from 10am to 5pm weekdays and 10am to 6pm weekends and school holidays, until November. Usual admission £8.95 adults, £7.75 seniors and £6.50 for children. Under threes go free. For more information visit www.kentlife.org.uk or call 01622 763936.