Walton Hall & Gardens
The reliable default: gardens, a children's zoo, a big playground and plenty of room to run. Pay for parking, nothing else.
Wheelock Hall Farm
- Cost
- £12.99 a child, £2.99 an adult
- Ages
- 1 to 10
- Where
- Sandbach, Cheshire
- Weather
- Mostly outdoors
- Booking
- Just turn up - they do not take bookings
From the Crewe Road, Wheelock Hall Farm looks like a farm shop and tea room on the edge of Sandbach. The reason to bring children is round the back: three large outdoor play areas with an assault course, swings, slides, go karts, small ride-on tractors and jumping pillows, plus an indoor soft play barn with a climbing tower, a football area and ball shooters, and a smaller soft play corner for toddlers.
One ticket, £12.99 a child and £2.99 an adult, covers the play areas, the barn and the animals: pigs, sheep, goats, donkeys, ponies, chickens and ducks, which children can feed as they walk round. There is no booking and no session time. It is open 9am to 6.30pm every day of the year except Christmas Day, and the farm's own line is that you can stay and play all day.
October is the busy month. The pumpkin patch sits inside the play area from Saturday 3 October, so the same entry price buys a pumpkin hunt as well, with the pumpkin itself extra. Santa's Grotto is coming back to the play barn this Christmas, with full-day farm entry included in the grotto ticket; dates and prices were not published when we checked.
What it costs: Play area entry £12.99 for children aged 1 and over, £2.99 per adult, under 1s free. Entry includes the animals, the three outdoor play areas and the soft play barn. During the October pumpkin patch the entry price is the same and pumpkins are priced by size.
Know before you go
- No dogs, apart from assistance dogs.
- The tea room stops serving hot food at 4pm but the play areas stay open until 6.30pm, so an after-school visit works if you eat first. The chips are made from the farm's own potatoes, and they will tell you so.
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★★★★★ 4.3 across 2,433 Google reviews.
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