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If you’re heading to Scotland on a £9.50 Holiday with your family, you’ll want some ideas up your sleeve to keep the kids entertained.
Of course, there are swimming pools, playgrounds and free entertainment at your holiday park – but if you want to step outside and explore the local area, there’s plenty on offer.
We’ve asked The Scottish Sun’s Travel Editor and holiday park staff on the best family-friendly activities in ScotlandCredit: Alamy
We’ve asked local experts for their top recommendations on what to do with your family in Scotland, with suggestions that are never too far from our £9.50 Holiday parks.
From child-friendly aquariums to free-to-enter country parks that have brilliant playgrounds, here’s where you should take the kids first.
Adventure park thrills
For families with kids needing to burn off some energy, a day trip to an adventure park could be a good bet.
Children will enjoy coming face-to-face with more than 22 prehistoric giants in Dinosaur Kingdom and embracing nature on a fun treetop trail (keep eyes peeled for red squirrels).
If you’re staying closer to Perth, you could instead head for Active Kids Adventure Park.
Recommended by Christopher Hill, Administration Manager at Tummel Valley Holiday Park, it has an indoor soft play and little ones will love feeding the animals.
Christopher added: “We also have magical bluebell woods at Kinclaven and seasonal fruit picking at Gloagburn Farm, which has a play park.”
Swings and steam engines
The Scottish Sun Travel Editor Heather Lowrie says: “Sundrum castle is just outside Ayr – you could go into the town and go to Ayr beach for its attractions, big swing park, and Pirate Pete’s adventure play areas for kids.
If trains are what your brood is into, Strathspey Steam Railway is another great idea for a family day out.
See the magnificent Cairngorm mountains from the comfort of a plush carriage, or stop off at Boat of Garten to spot ospreys at the nearby RSPB reserve.
The railway is located near Aviemore, around an hour’s drive from Tummel Valley Holiday Park.
Bungee jumping off Garry Bridge near Killiecrankie in PerthshireCredit: PA:Press Association
Free family activities
In Ayrshire, near holiday parks such as Sandylands, Eglinton Country Park is ideal for a family day out without spending a penny.
As well as having 400 acres for your kids to run around in, it has a big swing park and marked routes including a STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths) trail.
Morvyn Cattanach, General Manager at Sandylands Holiday Park says: “It’s a good option for families on a budget because it’s free to enter and there are lots of picnic areas and barbecue stations.”
Other top-rated free things to do in Scotland include hiking up Arthur’s Seat and visiting the National Museum of Scotland, both in Edinburgh, and Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum in Glasgow.
Leaps of faith
Older kids – and parents – can test their mettle with a bungee jump.
Highland Fling is just a short drive from Tummel Valley Holiday Park and offers heart-pounding activities such as bungee jumping, bridge swings and zip lining through the valley of Killiecrankie.
Meanwhile, around 20 miles south of Ayr on the west coast, Adventure Carrick offers a range of water-based thrills, including three-hour coasteering sessions (from £55pp).
Suitable from age eight, the high-energy sessions will see you climb cliffs and leap into swirling seas near Ballantrae.
For budding scientists
If your kids are scientists in the making, expand their little minds at a family-friendly museum like Glasgow Science Centre.
Its super-engaging exhibits include a Planetarium that transports you through the solar system and a “Perception” room with mind-bending visual illusions.
Wildlife lovers big and small can find their favourite species from all over the globe in Scotland.
You could head to Highland Wildlife Park near Aviemore – home to everything from polar bears and snow leopards to rare Scottish wildcats.
Or how about letting your kids be a zookeeper for the day at Camperdown Wildlife Park in Dundee?
For an aquatic adventure, SEA LIFE Loch Lomond contains a magical underwater world, and you can join turtle tea time and watch the tropical sharks being fed.
If your kids are scientists in the making, expand their little minds at a family-friendly museum like Glasgow Science Centre.Credit: Martin Shields
A tawny owl screeches nearby in the dark and her mate replies, hooting eerily from the forest below. A white dome floats in the gloaming above a plain black doorway outlined with red light, like a portal to another dimension. I’m in Grizedale Forest, far from any light-polluting cities, to visit the Lake District’s first public observatory and planetarium, which opened in May.
Grizedale Observatory offers immersive films in the planetarium and three-hour stargazing events that go on late into the night. There are sessions on astrophotography and, on moonless nights, dark sky astronomy with the chance to see “a glittering tapestry of stars, galaxies, nebulae and star clusters”. Its director, Gary Fildes, is a veteran in the field, having founded and led three UK observatories over two decades. The goal at Grizedale, he says, is to create “an immersive, year-round astronomy and science destination that brings the beauty of the Lake District skies to visitors”.
The observatory’s regular evenings form part of Cumbria’s annual dark skies festival in late October and November. The festival offers owl- and bat-spotting walks and chances to swim or canoe after dark. But the observatory does more than dip a toe in the cosmic lake – it’s a permanent centre for studying the stars. A group of 60 schoolkids is arriving in the morning.
I’m here for an Aurora Night, timed to coincide with a period of high solar activity, but the heavens are stubbornly blanketed with cloud. The first drops of rain are falling as we head into Mission Control, with its little cafe tables,hand-painted otherworldly mural, inflatable alien and row of model rockets, built to scale by the observatory’s manager, Ben Marshall, a spaceflight obsessive.
Robert Bryce Muir’s warrior sculpture in Grizedale Forest. Photograph: Stan Pritchard/Alamy
A couple of hours later, we’re all staring up in wonder at a bejewelled night sky with shooting stars – thanks to the centre’s planetarium. An illustrated talk about auroras in the Stargazers’ Lounge combines detailed explanations with a sense of cosmic wonder. In the Meteorite Lab next door, there are microscopes and little space rocks – including actual pieces of the moon and Mars.
After hot drinks in Mission Control, Gary leads us through torrential rain to the new cedar-smelling observatory he helped build. He shows us extraordinary photos of the spiralling Andromeda galaxy and the dark Horsehead nebula, silhouetted against a glowing red dust and gas cloud, all taken by the robotic telescope in the retractable custom-built dome. For nights when the weather won’t cooperate, Grizedale gives out a free clear-sky pass so visitors can come back and stargaze another time.
The observatory’s team are clearly enthusiasts. Gary has been fascinated by the night sky “ever since I was a kid growing up in Sunderland, standing in the back garden and looking up, wondering what all those stars were”. His life story is remarkable. He tells me: “I was a bricklayer for years, but that curiosity about the universe never really went away. Eventually, I decided to take a massive leap and follow that passion properly – and it changed my life. I built Kielder Observatory in Northumberland from scratch, then Grassholme Observatory in Teesdale, and now I’m working in Saudi Arabia developing the Al-Ula Manara Space Observatory, one of the most exciting astronomy projects in the world.”
Gary describes how one observatory visitor wept when she first saw Saturn through a telescope, explaining that her father used to draw planets in a wartime air raid shelter and ringed Saturn was her favourite. “For me, astronomy isn’t just about science and telescopes,” says Gary. “It’s about people. It’s about perspective, wonder, and realising that we’re all part of something far bigger.”
The Hawkshead valley looking towards the Old Man of Coniston and Tarn Hows. Photograph: Martin Bache/Alamy
No buses run to Grizedale Forest, but getting here without a car has been surprisingly easy. After an early start from Essex into London, the train up to Oxenholme takes less than three hours, racing past the Chilterns woods and Midlands canals to the cloud-capped Cumbrian fells. The branch line to Windermere is a 20-minute ride through tussocky fields of Herdwick sheep and slate-roofed, whitewashed villages. Finally, bus 505 from outside Windermere station loops round the lake and winds through hilly beech woods to reach the village of Hawkshead by lunchtime.
There are various ways of getting from Hawkshead to the observatory, about 3 miles south: by bike, taxi or on foot. I decide to walk there over the fells near Esthwaite Water and back via Hawkshead Moor. There are streams to hop and boggy hills to climb, but the views are worth it. Home to the UK’s first forest sculpture park, Grizedale has a huge collection of site-specific art. With a map of the walking trails, I follow one waterlogged path to see Andy Goldsworthy’s sinuous dry-stone wall, Taking a Wall for a Walk. Created in 1990, it’s dressed in thick moss and hidden among dense fir trees. There’s no sound other than rushing water and the calls of tiny, pine-loving goldcrests.
Forestry England lets out a little cabin next door to the observatory, and I’m sleeping there tonight. It’s a real log cabin, immaculately clean, with walls of thick pine trunks, tartan wool curtains and furry blankets. Umbrellas stand by the cabin door, on hand for the changeable Cumbrian weather. On a nocturnal trip to the loo, up a leaf-covered slope, I see a handful of stars finally winking through a gap in the clouds.
Heading back towards Hawkshead the next day, I find one of Grizedale’s newer works of art. On a grassy promontory between two waterfalls, Saad Qureshi’s Flight(2021) involves what looks like stained glass on steel filigree, creating iridescent dragonfly wings. Overnight rain has made the tumbling becks spectacular. Robert Bryce Muir’s powerful metal warriors struggle, roped together, in the trees nearby. Squelching through fields, I detour to Esthwaite, Hawkshead’s wildlife-rich lake. Redwings startle from berry-laden bushes and a cormorant skims over the water. Two swans fly overhead, their whirring wings loud in the quiet valley.
A presentation on constellations inside the planetarium
I’m staying tonight in the cosy, 17th-century King’s Arms, which reopened in August after an exquisitely tasteful refurb. My room, with its gnarled oak beams and cushioned bay window overlooking the village square, is all dusky rose and moss green, with elegant watercolours and floral fabrics. Downstairs, there’s a log-burner and local real ales in the slate-floored bar, and elegant plates in the dining room (the jalapeño jam alongside my onion bhaji is garnished with a purple pansy).
With its choice of pubs and cafes, picnic-ready delis, a well-stocked outdoor shop and a cake-filled honesty stall, fell-ringed Hawkshead is a walkers’ paradise. The former Beatrix Potter gallery (which was once her husband’s office) reopened in August as the National Trust’s first stand-alone secondhand bookshop. There’s a craft fair in the village hall and local ghost walks (£8 adults, £6 under-12s, usually on Wednesdays and Sundays).
The original Grasmere Gingerbread shop started in the mid-19th century, next to the quiet riverside churchyard where William Wordsworth lies buried. Now, 170 years later, a sister shop has appeared on Hawkshead’s pretty village square. There’s a plan to produce star-shaped cakes in support of the observatory. I stock up with chutneys from Hawkshead Relish and fresh gingerbread to take home tomorrow. Above the square, the cloudy skies are clearing and the stars are coming out.
Entrance to Grizedale Observatory is £13 adults, £8 concessions, £35 families; three-hour stargazing is £30 adults, £25 concessions, £89 families.Accommodation was provided by the King’s Arms in Hawkshead (doubles from £112.50) and the Cabin in Grizedale (from £117 a night, airbnb.co.uk). Transport was provided by Avanti West Coast (London to Oxenholme from about £35 one-way) and Stagecoach. Further information at visitlakedistrict.com
Joseph McCabe, who runs his own construction firm and co-owns a party boat business, was jailed for 46 weeks on Friday at Edinburgh Sheriff Court after admitting four sexual offences
Joseph McCabe sexually assaulted cabin crew(Image: Alexander Lawrie)
A former soldier who sexually assaulted four Jet2 cabin crew during a flight to Tenerife has been jailed.
Joseph McCabe groped and slapped the buttocks of two flight attendants before grabbing a third around the waist and attempting to hug a fourth. A court heard McCabe’s behaviour forced the plane, which had left Edinburgh, to be diverted to the Portuguese island of Porto Santo.
Police there arrested the 40-year-old man and, last month, he admitted the four sexual offences. McCabe, who was a private in the Royal Logistic Corps for five years, was jailed for 46 weeks on Friday at Edinburgh Sheriff Court.
The court heard McCabe made sexual comments to one woman about her tights and make up, asked her age and where she lived and ripped up a written warning he had been given for his drunken conduct. The former soldier also threw his bank card at an air employee and began dancing in the aisle on the plane in March last year.
The defendant, who now runs his own construction firm and co-owns a party boat business called The Drunken Anchor, has been handed a lifelong ban from flying with Jet2 and has refused to pay the £5,000 fine the airline had imposed on him.
Sentencing, Sheriff Alison Stirling said the offence had involved “a high level of culpability and a high level of harm”. McCabe, who has two children, was also placed on the sex offenders register for 10 years and was made subject to non-harassment orders banning him from having any contact with the victims for an indefinite period. Solicitor Anna Kocela, defending, said her client is a self-employed building boss and had been drinking excessively at the time of the flight due to a family bereavement.
Previously, prosecutor Miriam Farooq told the court the Jet2 flight took off from Edinburgh Airport bound for Tenerife with around 110 passengers on board at around 8.30am on March 15 last year, reports Daily Record.
Ms Farooq said the flight was packed with families and children and shortly after take off cabin crew had noticed McCabe “making multiple trips to the toilet”.
The fiscal depute said around 90 minutes into the flight a female flight attendant was serving a passenger when she “felt someone behind her touching her buttocks”.
The employee turned round to find McCabe was “looking at her with a smirk on his face” and had asked her “where she bought her tights because he liked them”.
McCabe, from Glasgow, was given a verbal warning on the flight and then ripped up a written warning given to him by the air crew for his shocking behaviour.
