Rosewall

Within a couple of minutes of Rosewall, hunt for fossils on the Osmington shoreline or get watery with the snorkelling, surfing and other sports available at Ringstead Bay; both options are available all around the Dorset coast along with the increasingly popular zorbing over water or land.

Weymouth has a sheltered beach and seventeenth century harbour to coast around as well as loads more watersports and old-fashioned seasideness in donkey rides and Punch and Judy. For slightly more sophisticated fare, there are opps in the town to get the tills ringing: regular markets, the smart shops of New Bond Street, St Thomas Street and St Mary Street, and the smaller more specialist outlets of St George Street and St Alban Street.

Fossil finders will dig the ancient spots of the 95-mile stretch of Jurassic Coast such as Lyme Regis, Charmouth and Chesil Beach; there are guided fossil walks from the Lyme Regis Museum which also has a geology gallery telling of the area’s early days, and you can catch a Jurassic Coast sea or land tour from almost every town along the route.

If you like your history slightly more modern, there are two cracking castles in the vicinity, Corfe and Portland, the latter on the isle of Portland five miles south of Weymouth and reached via the shingle of Chesil Bank. Trot east too to horseshoe-shaped Lulworth Cove and Lulworth Castle, a seventeenth century pad that’s now home to Camp Bestival, and to Dorchester for the Iron Age hill fort Maiden Castle.

The literati will know that Dorset is Thomas Hardy as well as fossil and watersports land: Dorchester, Dorset’s county town, is 15 minutes inland from Weymouth and has Hardy’s old cottage, Max Gate. More modernly, Dorchester has several museums including the Dinosaur Museum; top shops, restaurants and pubs; and theatre, events and music run by Dorchester Arts. Bournemouth, with even more of the same, is about an hour’s drive from Weymouth.

Let the kids chatter wildly at Monkey World between Osmington Mills and Wareham, or challenge them to keep quiet among the mute swans at Abbotsbury Swannery; there’s a Sea Life at Lodmoor Country Park, 15 minutes’ walk from Weymouth along the promenade and through Greenhill Gardens.