10 Best Museums In County Durham

Beamish Open Air Museum, comfortably. It is a site museum, not a building — you walk between areas, go in and out of doors, and cover ground at a child's pace. Both flags sit on the record for exactly that reason. Plan on the whole day, not the morning, dress everyone for being outside for stretches of it, and expect to leave with parts of it unseen, as nearly everybody does.

HMS Trincomalee 1817 is recorded with an outdoor flag and no indoor one, which is a fair description of the weather on deck but not of the visit underneath it. Expect steep ladders, low headroom and dark spaces below, all of which delight some children and unsettle others. Take the flag as a warning about coats and not as a claim that the whole visit happens on deck.

Height and isolation. Killhope Lead Mining Museum sits up in the dales and not in a town, so it becomes the destination for the day and never a diversion en route to something else, and the weather up there behaves differently from the weather on the coast the same afternoon. It is also the entry on this list that most rewards children who like getting mucky. Warm layers and boots matter more here than at any other museum in the county.

For a genuinely covered outing, The Bowes Museum and Oriental Museum are the straightforward picks, both marked indoor with nothing outside, which for once means what it says. With an under-five, aim for one gallery done properly instead of a full circuit. Preston Park and Museum offers the other approach: a museum with grounds around it, so a restless child can be walked off outside and brought back in.