Tucked behind Fletcher's House on the high street in Woodstock, this free county museum is one of those places you walk into for twenty minutes and leave two hours later. The collections span centuries of Oxfordshire life, and the garden out back has something you won't find anywhere else: real dinosaur footprints.
The museum sits in a handsome townhouse on Park Street, just round the corner from the entrance to Blenheim Palace. It's free to visit, which makes it an easy addition to a day in Woodstock. The ground-floor galleries cover local archaeology, Roman finds from the surrounding villages and a good geological collection. Upstairs you'll find rotating exhibitions, often featuring work by Oxfordshire artists or exploring some corner of the county's social history. It's a genuinely well-curated space, thoughtful rather than showy, and the kind of museum where you actually read the labels.
The real draw for families, though, is the garden. A set of Megalosaurus footprints, preserved in Jurassic limestone, sits under a simple shelter at the far end. Children tend to be transfixed. There's also a pleasant café and a small shop. We usually pair it with a wander through Woodstock itself, perhaps lunch at one of the pubs, then a walk along the lake at Blenheim. The drive from Well Cottage takes about fifteen minutes.
“It's the dinosaur footprints that get everyone. Genuinely impressive, completely free, and right next door to Blenheim. Hard to beat on a rainy afternoon.”
All of this on the doorstep, and your own thatched cottage to come home to. Sleeps seven, less than a mile from Soho Farmhouse.