Kent is an unusual county. In many ways quintessentially English, it is also another country with its own crafts, produce and way of life. It is these distinctive rural traditions, fast disappearing into the blandness of modern life, which the Museum of Kent Life in Cobtree, near Maidstone, aims to preserve.

Over the past two years the museum has been strongly and successfully promoting itself to schools. Last year more than 6,000 school children, mainly from the south of England and London, wandered among its oast houses, orchards and hop garden - an approximately 350 per cent increase on the year before.

The museum, managed by an independent trust, attributes this rise to publicity plus a pack of materials relating national curriculum objectives closely to exhibits, the introduction of hands-on exhibits and a series of workshops for teachers.

But what can’t be ignored is that at the centre of the Cobtree estate is an activity which brought the city and country together in a unique and seemingly idyllic way and which must appeal especially to primary school children: hop picking.

Local women were the original hop-pickers. Farm owners began to recruit from the East End and other parts of London when an increase in the demand for beer followed the Industrial Revolution and the growth of the cities.

Families would travel down on the “hoppers specials” for around a month at a time, returning year after year. Most viewed it as their holiday; they certainly weren’t there for the money, which barely covered fares and food. Most were apparently seeking fresh air, sociability and a chance for their children to run free. But, as the museum makes clear, there was a dark side.

The hop-pickers’ huts preserved on the farm often housed a family of 10 but are the size of garden sheds. Illness was rife because of insanitary conditions. Workers were exploited. Even so, as contemporary accounts testify, most families appear to have looked forward to their month in the country and enjoyed it.

The museum has a field of hops, which are handpicked during its beer and hop festival in September, and a number of different sorts of furnished hoppers’ huts offered to pickers between 1880 and l950. There is also an oast house with two witch’s-hat roofs and a cowl on the summit that swings in the wind to control the flow of air to the kiln, where hops are rapidly dried. A hop press is also housed there and a Gypsy caravan, for Gypsies were also hop pickers, setting up camp near the farms.

Hops, however, are only one aspect of Kent’s diverse rural tradition. Elsewhere on the estate are orchards with typical Kentish fruit, and an early granary raised on stone pillars to keep out mice and rats and allow air to circulate.

There is a farmyard with animals for pupils to view and sometimes touch; and an exhibition on the Kentish author, H E Bates (famous now from David Jason’s TV performance in Darling Buds of May).

A huge barn contains tableaux depicting scenes from 19th-century Kentish life including a dairy and still-room (where families kept sides of bacon to smoke, pickle or cure along with fruits to bottle and vegetables to pickle), an old school room, winter ploughing and hedging and ditching. Schools can also book demonstrations of crafts including chair-making, textiles, pottery and the blacksmith at work and can have a ride on a wagon pulled by shire horse, Rosie.

o The cost is Pounds 1.50 per pupil; adults are free; demonstrations cost Pounds 1.00 per pupil. Details from the education officer, Museum of Kent Life, Cobtree, Lock Lane, Sandling, Maidstone, Kent. Tel: 01622 763936.