Ashmolean Museum

Five floors of art and antiquities in the heart of Oxford - this is one of Britain's finest university museums, and it's free to walk round. You'll find Egyptian mummies, Greek pottery, Old Master paintings, and a rather excellent collection of modern art all under one roof on Beaumont Street.

The ground floor draws most of the crowds. Roman sculpture, ancient glass, medieval metalwork - the kind of objects that make you realise how much skill these people had centuries before we invented electricity. Upstairs, the painting galleries are genuinely worth your time. Works by Raphael, Michelangelo, Monet and Turner sit alongside contemporary pieces without any fuss or pretension.

Really, this place works for different people in different ways. Art historians will spend half a day here happily. Families with curious kids can do a focused hour on one gallery without feeling rushed. Casual visitors pop in for twenty minutes to see a favourite painting. None of these approaches is wrong.

If you're based at Cedar Hollow Oxford or Valley Farm Campsite nearby, it's an easy walk into town. Rainy afternoon? This solves that problem entirely. Worth knowing: you can just turn up, no booking needed, and the building itself - all grand staircases and Victorian stone - is rather nice to move around in. Not everything needs to be a massive theme park experience.