Rockbourne Roman Villa

Rockbourne Roman Villa is the excavated footprint of a big Roman country house and its farm, with a small museum of the finds, sitting in fields outside Rockbourne village about 5 km north-west of Fordingbridge, just off the western edge of the Forest. It's the largest villa known in this corner of Hampshire: by the 4th century it had around 40 rooms set round a courtyard, with bath suites, living quarters, workshops and farm buildings; people lived here from the Iron Age to the 5th century. Go if Roman Britain interests you or you've got kids who'll enjoy dressing up as a legionary. It's a modest site, not a grand ruin: most of it has been reburied to protect it.

Outside, the room plan is marked out on the grass and information boards walk you round it. Two areas are left open. One is a stretch of geometric mosaic floor. The other is a hypocaust, the underfloor heating for a bath suite, where you look down on rows of stacked tile pillars that once carried a hot floor.

The museum is the best bit, and where most people spend their time. The discovery story is a good one: in 1942 a farmer's dog went after a ferret in the corner of a field and turned up oyster shells and mosaic tiles, and a local antiquarian, Morley Hewitt, bought the land and dug here every summer for three decades. The cases hold a hoard of 7,717 coins found buried in a pot, with nearly 500 of them on show beside the jar, a skeleton found in 1965 buried face down outside the dining room (nobody knows who he was or why), and two Roman milestones that had been reused as building stone. Kids can handle real artefacts and try on Roman kit.

Allow 45 minutes to an hour and a half. There's a free car park by the entrance, toilets, a small shop, hot drinks and ice creams, and picnic tables on the grass, so it works as a lunch stop. Dogs on leads are fine in the grounds but not in the museum. The outside is grass with ramps but no paths, so it's rough going with a wheelchair. It's seasonal, roughly spring to early autumn, and only open a few days a week, so check before you drive out; the ticket lets you come back all year. For a photo, stand at the edge of the hypocaust pit and shoot down so the rows of tile pillars fill the frame. It's the one bit that looks properly Roman.