Golden Acre Holiday Bungalows

Can’t get enough of coastal days? Hop behind the wheel for a 20-minute drive to Lyme Regis, one of the area’s best-known seaside towns and the site of a major dino discovery in the 19th century. The legacy continues at a dinosaur museum in the town and there are heaps of fossil hunting tours to sign up for... Otherwise, opt instead for wanders by the harbour and through the pleasure garden, or for spying out scenes from the French Lieutenant’s Woman and Jane Austen’s Persuasion. Wannabe zoologists should swan along to the Abbotsbury Swannery, where 600 mute swans hang out on the site of an 11th-century monastery (non-ornithologists can pass this time getting lost in the swannery’s maze), while botanists let their passions bloom at the Abbotsbury Subtropical Gardens, both within 25 minutes. Historians on the other hand, can wander the halls of Mapperton House and Shute Barton within 25 minutes, or get voyeuristic around the happily anatomically correct Cerne Abbas giant a little over half an hour away. For urban days, begin at the museums and twice-weekly vintage markets in Bridport, five minutes from base, before graduating to the larger towns of Weymouth and Dorchester (both about half an hour from the site) for Terracotta Warriors, animal parks, galleries, gardens and – of course – shopping.