Once you've explored the many highlights of the city, put Durham in your rear-view mirror and look forward to a cracking selection of nearby attractions.
Lovers of nature and adventures in the outdoors should dive deep into the Durham Dales, reached in little more than half an hour from the heart of the city. Part of the North Pennines Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty, the landscape here is peppered with waterfalls, age-old villages, gently rolling moors, tearooms, museums and woodland: in fact, everything that could make a patch of countryside so wonderfully English.
Taking the roads that lead east out of Durham, you'll hit the Durham Heritage Coast. Stretching between Sunderland in the north and Hartlepool in the south, the midpoint of this gorgeous shoreline sits directly east of Durham so you can explore much of it with ease. There are plenty of walking trails if you want to get active, while ribbons of sands stretch out for miles and miles for lazy days by the water's edge.
Beamish, The Living Museum of the North, is a terrifically popular attraction. It takes only 20 minutes to drive from Durham to the village of Beamish, where this open air museum echoes the living conditions of the folk who lived here in Georgian, Victorian and Edwardian times. The painstaking brick-by-brick process of bringing buildings here from across the region has paid dividends at this fascinating living museum, where you can tour a pit village, a farm and the town. There's plenty to see and do, so even children that would cry “that's boring” at the mere mention of the word “history” will find this place captivating. The ease of getting here is just another great reason to book car rental in Durham with TravelSupermarket.
