15 Go off road in a camping coach in Dorset
Rail-borne comfort doesn’t get any better than the High Cross Camping Coach: a century-old carriage that once clattered along the London, Brighton and South Coast Railway and now sits in a field in Dorset. Interiors are a study in Victoriana - brass luggage racks, leather window straps and William Morris curtains. It’s perfect for jaunts along the Jurassic Coast - you could visit the ochre cliffs at West Bay, shingly Chesil Beach and picturesque Weymouth and Dorchester, terminating at the camping coach at day’s end, cosying up to the wood-burning stove.
• Two nights from £210;
campingcoach.co.uk
16 Stay in a rotor-home in Lancashire
The Westland Lynx helicopter saw action in the Falklands, Iraq and the Balkans, and now the Ream Hills Holiday Park in Lancashire. The holiday park version (pictured below) isn’t operational (you may be relieved to find a television and also a microwave sitting where the controls should be). But on the plus side, any ordinary civilian can book a weekend stay inside the X-ray Zulu 676 helicopter, and re-enact scenes from Apocal ypse Now among the wooden lodges and hot tubs of a holiday park in rural Lancashire. There’s also a small veranda where you can put up a parasol precariously close to the rotor. If you fancy ascending to greater heights, take a 15-minute drive to Blackpool and climb 150m up its wrought-iron tower.