Our guide to luxury Dorset holidays

Pack the flask of sweet tea, tell the children tales of other-worldly fossils and the cries of battle in age-old civil wars; this road trip will take you two to three hours by car. If you’re taking the train, you’ll be whipped past rolling countryside down to the Jurassic Coast a little quicker, in around two hours. You can also fly into Bournemouth Airport, if you’re coming from further afield.

From olde inns to michelin-starred restaurants, food in Dorset is all about combining tradition and creativity, with fresh-as-can-be ingredients from land and sea. Ingredients so good they draw London’s most forward-thinking chefs down south, many setting up shop in pretty listed stone pubs and tiny cob cottages that earn a prestigious star.

There are a few dishes Dorset is particularly famous for, some of which you won’t find anywhere else. We’re talking wedges of warm, freshly-baked Dorset apple cake freckled with caramelised sultanas, Portland saltwater crab delicately sandwiched between white cob bread and Knob Biscuits covered in ‘thunder and lightning’ – a crisp, golden and crumbly rusk-like biscuit that looks like a bread roll, halved and spread with local honey and thick cream.

All along Dorset’s 96-mile long Jurassic Coast, the land is fringed with magnificent beaches. Not all are sandy; many are, in fact, shingle beaches (like Chesil Beach in Lyme Regis), with ancient fossils buried underfoot waiting for would-be palaeontologists to discover.

For those that prefer the unmistakable feeling of sand between their toes, there are plenty of golden, miles-long beaches and secluded coves to explore. Try taking a day trip to:

Shell Bay, Studland

East Beach, West Bay (where ITV’s Broadchurch was filmed)

Cobb Beach, Lyme Regis

Weymouth Beach, Weymouth (Dunkirk was filmed in the harbour)

Avon Beach, Mudeford

Enter a land where time stood still. Abandoned in haste during WWII, in 1943 the military gave residents in Tyneham Village 28 days to pack-up and leave, for vital forces training during the war. Now this deserted village, lost in the past, is open to the public at weekends, albeit still under the strict ownership of the MoD. Enter a true time-warp, where villagers would have once gathered in its 12th century church, crammed big family gatherings in tiny stone cottages and watched their children do the hopscotch outside the village school. Part-ruin, part-restored, you’ll find Tyneham along the coast, just past Durdle Door and sandwiched between Lulworth Cove and Swanage.

Dorset’s poster child draws crowds all year long, at almost all hours of the day. It was crowned England’s first ever natural UNESCO World Heritage Site for good reason; Mother Nature has been working on this masterpiece for 140 million years. It looks like a dragon from the south, with an eye and nostrils, and the word from the locals is that it’s never there at night… Get here early; arrive before 9am, ideally 8am, and you and your clan should have Durdle Door all to yourself. Bring the breakfast hamper and nibble on plump strawberries as the sun rises.