A rainy day near Crewkerne

Somerset in February is not always the picture on the front of the brochure. These are the places we send people when the forecast has gone against them, all within about half an hour of the pub.

Fleet Air Arm Museum, Yeovilton

Twenty-odd minutes north east, on the edge of the Royal Navy airfield at Yeovilton. It holds the largest collection of naval aircraft in Europe, and the two things people remember are Concorde 002, the British prototype that first flew in 1969 and which you can walk through, and the carrier experience, where you go up in a lift and out onto a mocked-up flight deck with aircraft landing on the wall around you. It absorbs the best part of a day, and it absorbs children particularly well.

Haynes Motor Museum, Sparkford

About twenty-five minutes away, near Yeovil, and the same trip in a different direction. Over four hundred cars and motorcycles, including the Red Room, which is exactly what it sounds like: a hall of red cars from a 1966 Mustang convertible downwards. Even people who do not care about cars tend to enjoy it, because the collection is broad rather than specialist.

Perry’s Cider, Dowlish Wake

A quarter of an hour west. A family cider farm four generations in, with the original sixteenth-century thatched barn still standing and a small museum of old cider-making kit inside it. There is a farm shop full of Somerset cheese, chutney and cider, and a café. It is a good hour rather than a whole day, and it pairs well with Barrington Court nearby.

Houses that work in the wet

Forde Abbey, twenty minutes west at Thorncombe, is a lived-in family house built into a Cistercian monastery, so there is plenty of indoors to it if the thirty acres of garden are too wet to enjoy. Montacute House and Barrington Court both have interiors worth an hour, though check what is open, as Montacute’s upper floors have been shut for conservation work on the staircases.

In town

Crewkerne’s own Museum and Heritage Centre is a five-minute walk from us, in a late Georgian building, with four galleries on the town’s flax, sailcloth and social history. If you have children who need running about rather than looking at things, the Aqua Centre has a pool.

Or stay put

There is no shame in writing the day off. The bar has the sort of corners that suit a wet afternoon, and Sunday lunch here takes as long as you want it to.