Five top-flight timepieces your great-grandchildren will thank you for.

You really do get your money’s worth with luxury watches. Makers are refreshingly honest – rightfully proud, in fact – about what they offer for your buck. As our previous Journal article made clear, £5,000 will grant you access to watchmakers with serious cachet. Knocking on the door of £10,000? Well, now you’re venturing into collector territory, with exquisitely hand-crafted mechanics, copper-bottomed heritage and investment potential all in the bag. Serviced regularly and cared for lovingly, there’s no reason your grandson and his son won’t treasure it, too. Read on to discover the cream of the crop.

IWC Schaffhausen has got your back on land, sea or air. Just ask Mr Lewis Hamilton, for starters. Thanks to the innovative Swiss watchmaker’s antimagnetic Ingenieur range has been adopted by the Mercedes-AMG F1 team. While virtually every RAF pilot wore one from 1948 through to 1981, as well; plus, real-life Top Gun pilots in Miramar, California. That takes care of land and air, then – but sea? They’re just as good 300 metres beneath the waves, too. The lineage of the brand’s watertight Aquatimer diving watches stretches from 1967, via the wrists of the Cousteau Society’s explorers, all the way to the waterbaby under consideration here. The marine-grade bronze case of this precision chronograph references the gleaming fittings aboard Mr Charles Darwin’s HMS Beagle on its pioneering Origins of Species trip in 1836. The mighty hunk of ballast will patinate with exposure to moisture, developing a greeny-white crust unique to every watch – a crust that actually serves to protect the virgin alloy beneath. Plus, profits from it aid the Charles Darwin Foundation which is studying biodiversity out in the Galapagos Archipelago. What’s not to love?

Take our word for it – a Piaget for less than £10,000 is something of a bargain. This is the type of Piaget Polo you might consider wearing for a polo match, rather than watching. It by no means sacrifices the Piaget’s refinement, however. The Richemont Group’s most dapper fine watchmaker is paying homage to its 1980s icon. In this instance this takes the form of a youthful reimagining, rather than a slavish reboot; perfect for today’s discerning thirtysomethings. The cushion dial still feels very 1980s, but the decision to make it steel (the titular “S”) makes this a highly affordable way into the top-flight. Hand-finished, with self-winding mechanical, it is crowned with a mallet-proof DLC, or “diamond-like carbon” bezel. Plus the stainless steel case combines round and cushion shapes.

Polo: elegance, speed, power with an undercurrent of brutality. It is the most evocative of games. It is against this backdrop that one of watchmaking’s most recognisable icons was born. Legend has it that in the 1930s a group of polo players ambushed Swiss watch dealer Mr César de Trey after a match and challenged him to make a watch robust enough to withstand the action on the field. Mr Jacques-David LeCoultre took on the challenge, answering with the revolutionary Reverso in 1931, which allowed you to flip the case over, facing its metal back forwards to deflect errant mallets. This 28mm stainless steel piece embodies the original Art Deco-inspired design down to the nearest millimetre, but instead of a steel caseback there’s a second “Clous de Paris” engraved dial with a day and night indicator – perfect for checking on the time back in Blighty while watching a chukka in Buenos Aires.

In its brief 12-year life, British wunderkind Bremont has managed to hook up with Jaguar’s heritage division, take on official timing responsibilities for the last round of America’s Cup regattas, even gone to the ends of the earth on the wrist of polar explorer Mr Ben Saunders. But it’s aviation where the hearts of founding brothers Messrs Giles and Nick English lie – they even named their fledgling brand after a pea farmer whose field they were forced to crash-land in, while navigating the French skies in their 1950s Broussard. In honing their squadron of elite chronometers, each encased in jet-turbine-grade steel, Messrs English have scored some extraordinary high-altitude formations, supplying special editions to the world’s top military aircrew and even the RAF in its centenary year. But what of the aircraft manufacturers themselves? Nothing less than an exclusive partnership with Boeing, forged on the eve of the Seattle giant’s own 100th anniversary in 2016. This chronograph, faultlessly crafted at Bremont’s twin manufacturing hubs of Silverstone and Henley on Thames in a limited run of just 300 pieces has just the right mix of sepia-toned “magnificent men” nostalgia and future-forward technology. The case is made of aviation-grade Ti 6-4 titanium for a start – three times lighter and more durable than stainless steel – plus the crown is set with carbon fibres from the fuselage of a Boeing 787 Dreamliner aeroplane.

The gentle tick of a 28,800 vibrations-per-hour chronograph, or the throaty bark of a Detroit V8? How about both? The watch world and the car world cross-fertilise with inevitable virility here, thanks to the precision engineering and status symbolism afforded by both, albeit on rather different scales. One is a high-performance engine mounted to a chassis you sit inside, the other a high-performance movement mounted in a case you wear. But the highest-profile, high-octane horological hook-ups – viz Bremont x Jaguar, IWC Schaffhausen x Mercedes AMG, Bell & Ross x Renault F1 – seem to have settled down of late. Which means Baume & Mercier’s curveball celebration of an American automotive legend, launched to celebrate 50 years since Mr Carroll Shelby’s team won the World Manufacturer’s GT trophy with an all-American team for the first time. How he did this was import British AC Ace coupés and fit them with Ford’s mighty V8 engine – a combination with so much “bite” that the serpentine nickname stuck, coining an immortal automotive name in the process. Any doubts as to Baume & Mercier’s racing pedigree are quickly annulled by the sheer cool of this top-end commemorative piece: a surprisingly affordable update of the brand’s vintage-tinged chronograph, in block-striped Shelby team colours, the seconds hand cleverly counterbalanced by the Cobra logo. The real “bite” in this Cobra, however, is its flyback function, which resets the stopwatch to zero with an instant restart. Perfect for timing your successive laps. But maybe from the passenger seat, yes?