Buckler's Hard Story


The hamlet's fascinating Maritime Museum and heritage centre chart the inlet's shipbuilding history and role in WWII, and feature immaculately preserved 18th-century labourers' cottages.


Lonely Planet's must-see attractions

Nearby attractions

1. Beaulieu

2.26 MILES

Petrolheads, historians and ghost-hunters gravitate to Beaulieu (bew-lee) – a vintage car museum, stately home and tourist complex centred on a 13th…

2. St Barbe Museum

5.99 MILES

Explores tales of boatbuilders, sailors, smugglers, salt-makers and farmers through an engaging mix of hands-on displays, models and artefacts.

3. Osborne House

7.38 MILES

Lemon-frosted and Italianate, Osborne House is pure Victorian pomp. Built in the 1840s at the behest of Queen Victoria, the monarch grieved here for many…

4. New Forest Centre

8.46 MILES

Features a local labourer's cottage (complete with socks drying beside the fire), potato dibbles and a cider press. The minifilm makes for an accessible…

5. Carisbrooke Castle

9 MILES

Charles I was imprisoned here before his execution in 1649. Today you can clamber the sturdy ramparts and play bowls on the very green the doomed monarch…

6. Needles Old & New Battery

11.76 MILES

The Victorian fort complex at Wight's western tip is home to two gun emplacements where engrossing displays reveal how the site was established in 1862,…

7. Explosion, Museum of Naval Firepower

12.91 MILES

This 1771 powder magazine is packed full of ordnance tracing the story of naval munitions from gunpowder to Exocet missiles. Explosion is in Gosport, on…