Egg hunts
All five RHS gardens have giant egg hunts among the April blooms, from delicate violets and alpine pear blossom at Rosemoor in Devon to hellebores and flamboyant camellias at Bridgewater in Salford (garden entry from £12.35 adult, £5.95 child). The daffs are blooming in the Derwent valley, where there’s an Easter egg trail around the Heights of Abraham. Take a cable car up to the wooded clifftop park and explore two underground caverns, nature walks and epic adventure playgrounds (entry from £23.50 adult, £16 child). Arrive by train or bus and get 20% off.
Look for photos of bird and insect eggs at Winchester Science Centre as part of the Boom & Bloom holiday activities (entry £15). Or dragon eggs at Gwrych Castle near Rhyl in north Wales, where I’m a Celebrity was filmed during the pandemic. Entry gets you an Easter puzzle book, dragon keeper’s manual and bonus prizes for dressing up (£10 adult, £12.50 child). Forts, castles, abbeys and mansions across Scotland are hosting Eggsplorer trails. Track down clues to win chocolate while you wander the cloisters at Melrose Abbey in the Borders or craggy Urquhart Castle above legend-rich Loch Ness (prices vary).
Pasqueflowers
Easter is the time to look for rich purple pasqueflowers on Therfield Heath near Royston in Hertfordshire. A chalky tracks lead through a little beechwood known as Fox Covert to the grassy slope covered in thousands of these stunning blooms. In Royston itself you can visit a mysterious cave, covered in carvings and open from 1 April for guided tours on weekends and bank holidays (£8 adult, £2 child). Pasqueflowers also bloom in the Bedfordshire Chilterns and a handful of other sites (see wildlifetrusts.org)
More flowery walks
Spring comes early in Cornwall, with woods and fields full of purple rhododendrons and golden gorse flowers. Take a guided walk around Fowey, a family stroll along the wooded Pentewan valley or a tour of Beyond Paradise locations in Looe with Lucy Daniel (from £15 adult, £7.50 child). Elsewhere, the Dylan Thomas birthday walk near Laugharne Castle in Carmarthenshire climbs between pale banks of primroses for views across the castle and saltmarsh-bordered River Tâf.
The thyme-scented Shropshire Hills offer circular walks and cycle rides, from an amble around Onny Meadows and budding orchards to the 30-mile Bishop’s Castle Cracker. Winchester offers chalk stream the River Itchen with nesting waterbirds and clumps of golden kingcups, as well as butterfly-rich St Catherine’s Hill topped with an iron age hill fort and mysterious mizmaze. And the beechwood walk around Castle Coole near Enniskillen in Northern Ireland is one of many carpeted in April with starry white wood anemones.
Birds and animals
It’s a great time of year for nature walks. Hirsty’s Family Fun Park near Great Yarmouth is gearing up to welcome more than 200 new lambs and calves over the Easter holidays. Visitors can take a trailer ride to the maternity shed then let off steam on a hay bale mountain and bouncing pillows (£9.50 adult, £13.50 child). For the ultimate bird of prey experience, the National Botanic Gardens of Wales in Carmarthenshire is offering private encounters with owls, falcons and even – for adults – eagles at the British Bird of Prey Centre (from £60 adult, £30 child). And 25 miles to the south there’s a new Duck Detectives story trail at Llanelli Wetland Centre (free with entry: £9.45 adult, £6 child).
Exhibitions
See the subtle knife and gold-rimmed alethiometer from the BBC/HBO show His Dark Materials at an exhibition at Swansea’s Glynn Vivian art gallery (free, until 23 April). Displays include props, costumes, special FX and concept boards from the TV series based on Philip Pullman’s books. The brightly coloured Towner gallery, near the beach in Eastbourne, is celebrating its centenary. The two free shows currently exploring the gallery’s collection include works by Warhol, Ravilious, Grayson Perry and Turner-winning Elizabeth Price. There are free creative workshops and £3 screenings of family faves in the Towner at Eastbourne’s only indie cinema. Wordsworth Grasmere’s new exhibition for 2023, To the Lakes!, explores 19th-century tourism in Cumbria.
Hunt for poetry-themed eggs in the woods and get 20% off entry if you arrive on the bus; fares are £2 until June (from £11 adult, £5 child). Down the road at the Windermere Jetty Museum, with its interesting collection of boats, an exhibition of photos Forty Farms charts local farmers’ stories (£9 adult, £4.50 child). Don’t miss the jetty’s great cafe, with its view across island-dotted Windermere to the Coniston fells. During Edinburgh’s science festival in the first half of April, there’s a free exhibition at the Royal Botanic Garden, Shipping Roots, about plants that have travelled, especially from Australia, including eucalyptus and prickly pear. The festival also has workshops on everything from coding to coral.
Boats, buses and trains
Easter sees the annual boat gathering in Ellesmere Port, Cheshire, where the Manchester Ship and Shropshire Union canals meet. Historic boats from all over the country congregate at the National Waterways Museum over the April bank holiday weekend for a four-day festival featuring crafts, food and working steam engines. There are costumed musicians, morris dancers, water-themed activities, boat trips and – new for this year – the chance to ride a vintage bus to the museum’s off-site old boat store, not normally open to the public (£11.75 adult, £8.50 child). England’s £2 cap on bus fares has been extended until June, so a scenic bus ride can be a cheap way to get to places or a fun activity in its own right.
The vintage steam trains on the Gwili Railway near Carmarthen are running over Easter, giving visitors a nostalgic waft of soot as they chug through the blossoming Welsh countryside and along the winding River Gwili (£17 adult, £13 child). It’s the perfect time of year too around the Bluebell Railway line, running from East Grinstead in West Sussex to Sheffield Park, East Sussex. Trackside woods overflow with flowers, and the 11-mile steam train ride takes in fields of sheep, Wealden views and viaducts. The line’s four stations each have the distinctive style of a different era, from late Victorian to 1960s, and walks between them nearly all pass bluebell woods. Visitors arriving in East Grinstead by train can get two-for-one tickets on the steam railway.
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Stories and plays
Jupiter Artland, a sculpture park and gallery in the countryside near Edinburgh, offers a basket of Easter activities including storytelling picnics in the woods (£11 adult, £7 child entry, plus £7 picnic). Castle Ward in County Down, a Game of Thrones location, is providing more family-friendly storytelling with the adventures of Eithne (free with entry: £12 adult, £6 child). Playhouse Whitley Bay in Tyne and Wear has an Easter panto based on Rapunzel, starring Strictly’s Joanne Clifton (£20.95 adult, £18.50 child), while NoFit State is staging spectacular subversive circus in Swansea (£18 adult, £14 child).
Crafts
Easter bonnets are old hat – you can make nests in Norfolk, kites in Yorkshire or animal pompoms in Midlothian. Near Edinburgh, Dalkeith country park’s spring activities include a duck race along the River Esk. Within its grounds is Fort Douglas adventure park, with tunnels, slides, rope bridges and zip wires and a scavenger hunt, and Restoration Yard, which hosts workshops for kids and grownups, including cookie decorating, mask making or candle pouring (from £35 adult, £5 child).
There are Easter Saturday workshops for children at the Alley theatre in Strabane, County Tyrone: make a colourful wreath from recycled materials or a funky clay frog (£3 child). On the huge Holkham estate on the Norfolk coast, there are stories, toy boxes, craft sessions and an Easter market (entry from £9 adult, £4.50 child). A walk around West Yorkshire’s Harewood estate passes budding April bluebells and views across Capability Brown-landscaped parkland, with red kites circling overhead. Celebrating these elegant birds, reintroduced to the area from 1999, are holiday kite-making workshops and outdoor activities (£3 child, plus standard entry: £14 adult, £8 child).
Gardens
April brings cherry blossom and narcissi to Scampston in North Yorkshire, as well as an Easter bunny trail, following clues around the walled garden. On the bank holiday Monday, there will be fairy godmothers running games and egg-decorating (£2.50 child, plus standard entry: from £9.50 adult, £5.50 child).
Attadale Gardens in the Scottish Highlands reopens on 1 April (£10 adult, free child) replete with daffodils, primroses and colourful rhododendrons, and there is a self-service cafe selling coffee and homemade cakes such as coconut, lime and white chocolate muffins. In Cornwall, the Eden Project’s eco-themed activities, with pick ’n’ mix prizes, include a straw-bale Bread Maze for scooters, a golf course in the style of allotments, giant slingshots for delivering pollen, scavenger hunts and cow-corking.
New openings
Why should the kids get all the fun? At Ad Gefrin in Wooler, Northumberland, a new whisky distillery and Anglo Saxon museum opens on 25 March. There are tours and tastings, ancient artefacts and celebrations of Northumbrian heritage (from £10 adult, £5 child). In Portsmouth, the Mary Rose is launching a new interactive ride so visitors can relive the ship’s discovery, excavation and salvage 40 years ago.
When the wooden warship sank in the Solent in 1545, the lives of the 500 men (and the ship’s dog) who sank with it were frozen in time. Their possessions, including leather jerkins, longbows and even a backgammon board, paint a rich portrait of Tudor life in the surrounding museum (£24 adult, £19 child). Up the Solent in Southampton, there’s a new accessible trail. It’s self-guided with an emphasis on texture and smell, including a wisteria pergola, which starts flowering in April (free).