Mary Rose Museum

Henry VIII's warship lies in a climate-controlled chamber in Portsmouth, and seeing it still makes your jaw drop. The Mary Rose sank in 1545 during a battle with the French - one moment she was firing on the enemy, the next she was going down with most of her crew. What you get now is the actual hull, painstakingly raised from the seabed in 1982 after 437 years underwater, along with thousands of artefacts that paint an oddly intimate picture of Tudor life aboard.

Walking around the wreck itself is properly moving. You can see the cannons still in place, the carpenter's tools, even leather shoes and wooden plates. The museum does a decent job of explaining the conservation process - they've been keeping the timber wet since it came up, which sounds bonkers but makes sense once you understand what happens to waterlogged wood in air. There's also a good collection of smaller finds displayed nearby: longbows, daggers, and personal items that belonged to men who died in those waters.

It's absorbing stuff if you care about maritime history or Tudor England, though younger kids might lose interest after 90 minutes or so. Lee-on-the-Solent is just up the coast, making this a natural stop if you're based at Kingfisher Caravan Park or Hayling Island Holiday Park. Budget a good two hours minimum if you want to read the panels properly. The setting in Portsmouth's Historic Dockyard means you could easily combine this with HMS Victory or the other naval museums nearby - though that'll eat up most of a day.