Thrybergh Country Park Campsite

For further adventures in birdland, it’s a 15-minute drive to the RSPB Dearn Valley Old Moor nature reserve, a mix of meadows, reedbeds and grasslands inhabited (or visited) by the likes of lapwings and kingfishers, barn owls and egrets. The history’s not all of the natural kind: Rotherham’s Clifton Park Museum (10 minutes) gives an entertaining overview of the town’s industrial heyday, topped off with a park containing rollercoasters and other family attractions. It’s a similar distance to 11th-century Coningsbrough Castle, easy to imagine as the inspiration for Sir Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe; Wentworth Woodhouse, 15 minutes away, is a mere 350 years old but newly open for guided tours and with 82 acres of garden for wandering. Many of the area's big houses were built thanks to big business and heavy industry: Kelham Island Museum (25 minutes) tells the story of Sheffield and its steel; you can discover the science behind it at the Magma Science Adventure Centre back in Rotherham, described as a ‘hands-on, feet-in, full-on’ science experience and aimed at younger visitors. After all that industry, clear lungs and heads by heading out into the wilderness, Yorkshire’s other great resource. It’s half an hour to Langsett, its reservoir and the many footpaths leading around it and up into the hills, where the peaks meet the dales. For further peak explorations, and the classic stuff like trips up Mam Tor and down the Blue John Mines, it’s an hour to Castleton.