We've all been there. It's the weekend. You desperately want to get out of the house and do something, anything, but the children are glued to the PlayStation or lolling on the sofa saying things such as “I'm bored”. The uphill struggle required to change the status quo stops most of us in our tracks. It's no wonder we don't often bother to get any farther than the local swings.

As mothers, with six children between us, we were desperate to break this cycle and went in search of something interesting to do on holidays. We knew we didn't want to spend lots of money going to a theme park; we didn't want always to end up at the local museum. We wanted to find a way of doing something together that we could all get something out of.

Confined indoors by years of lack of sleep, nappies and tantruming toddlers, we missed the sense of freedom and adventure you get from being out in the fresh air. We wanted to get out walking again, as we had done before children. But children growing up in the digital age don't necessarily know how to enjoy the outdoors as we did: getting muddy, runnng wild, climbing hills or spotting birds, bugs, trees and flowers.

How could we inspire them? We tracked down the settings for classic children's stories: Swallows and Amazons in the Suffolk sailing village of Pin Mill; Winnie the Pooh's Hundred Acre wood; the real Watership Down; Roald Dahl country. We set walks around scientific or artistic themes: the Kent Downs where Darwin studied honeybees and orchids; the Stour valley where Constable painted The Hay Wain. We discovered ruined castles in Essex, sandy beaches littered with shells on Mersea Island, also in Essex and the best place to see raptors in southern England on the Isle of Sheppey. Our walks have to be accessible from London, where we live, but there must be hundreds more to be done around the country. And the basics of what makes a walk work are the same wherever you are.

We believed that having a focus gave us our best shot at getting the children excited about going out. We wanted to impart a sense of adventure and discovery, whether it was folklore, flora and fauna or how to play pooh sticks. Most importantly, we wanted the walks to be fun.

As we walked, we were drawn into memories of our own childhood, blowing dandelion clocks and making camps. We tried to remember the names of wildflowers in the hedgerows, the words of songs, how to go pond dipping and realised we had forgotten quite a bit. So we wrote down all the lovely stuff of our childhoods in one place, as an aide memoire, with identification charts for wild flowers and birds, games to play, rhymes, songs, inspiration and ideas.

You need to know where you're going

But finding the right walks was not as straightforward as we thought, proving to us just how tricky it is to set off with a carload of children and a map and expecting it to work. All too clearly we can remember interminable 1970s car journeys, driving round “the long way” because you've taken a wrong turn, singing endless rounds of ten green bottles, or struggling through bramble-bound footpaths, finding that the path doesn't go to the beach after all and you've arrived on the one day of the year that the castle/house/pub doesn't open.

To make a day a success you need to know pretty much exactly what you are going to find when you get there. We became quite ruthless about the quality of the walks. They had to fulfil our wish list: a good reason for going; a sense of being away from everything; enough things to do on the way to keep everyone happy; and somewhere fantastic to have a picnic or a great pub nearby.

Has it worked? Inevitably, our children still roll their eyes at the thought of going for a walk. “I feel really annoyed when my mum says we are going, but I love it when we get there,”' says Edward, aged 11. The answer is to tempt them out. Say “who wants to go on a Bear Hunt?” or “who wants to make a bow and arrow?” or “who wants to go crabbing today?” instead of “we're going on a walk”. Target their enthusiasms, be it sticks or skimming stones. Hook into their imaginations and set up the day as an adventure.

Once there, you can't fail to have a good time. There might well be a few tears on the way, but that's what the snacks and promised ice-creams are for (see panel, far left). As soon as you open the car door and let the children out, they will run off and you know that you've done the right thing. Like caged birds given their freedom.

Adventure Walks for Families in and Around London, by Becky Jones and Clare Lewis (Francis Lincoln, £8.99), published June 12, is available at £8.54, free p&p. Phone 0870 1608080; www.timesonline.co.uk/booksfirstbuy

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