You enter through the back of the Natural History Museum and the atmosphere shifts completely. Suddenly you're standing in a dim, towering Victorian hall packed floor to ceiling with glass cases of masks, amulets, weapons and shrunken heads. It feels less like a museum and more like stumbling into the private collection of some magnificently obsessive explorer.
The Pitt Rivers is one of those rare places that makes everyone, regardless of age, fall completely quiet for a moment before erupting into questions. The collection is arranged not by culture or era but by type: all the masks together, all the musical instruments together, all the tools for making fire. The effect is extraordinary. You find yourself seeing connections across centuries and continents that a conventional museum would never reveal. Children are transfixed by the drawers you can pull open (each one hiding further treasures), and adults tend to lose an hour without noticing it.
It sits at the rear of the Oxford University Museum of Natural History, which is itself worth a good wander for its Gothic Revival ironwork and its famous dodo. Together they make a perfect rainy afternoon from the cottage. The drive into Oxford takes around forty minutes; park at one of the park and ride sites on the edge of the city and bus in. Entry to both museums is free, which feels almost absurdly generous given what's inside.
“I've taken every guest here and not one has been disappointed. The kids open every drawer they can find; the grown-ups pretend they're not doing exactly the same thing.”
All of this on the doorstep, and your own thatched cottage to come home to. Sleeps seven, less than a mile from Soho Farmhouse.