Our Day At Puzzlewood

With Finley starting school next September I am making the most of the days we have together, especially half term. A friend mentioned a place called Puzzlewood that had a Halloween trail on with witches hidden in the trees and children need to find them to fill in a word search with the colour of the witches to win a prize. I had never heard of it before so after a quick google search I decided this was definitely somewhere I wanted to take the boys. It looked like so much fun and somewhere the boys could have a real adventure.

Monday morning came and we jumped in the car, picked up our best friends and headed off. It was only about an hour away from home in the Forest of Dean, just across the old Severn bridge which was an adventure in itself for the kid.

We arrived about 11am and headed on in. We had to queue a little bit to pay which is to be expected on a half term but it wasn't too long and we were off. The admission prices are really reasonable and I ended up paying £6.50 in total for the 3 of us and then an extra £1.50 for the witches trail.

As you head into the wood there are a couple of barns which one has picnic tables in and the other has an indoor play area for the kids with cosy coupes and a pretend road.

You enter the wood and it is breath taking and I can totally understand why they come here to do some films. Its dark but not scary dark, you are surrounded by trees and the floor is covered in tree roots, I can understand why they say it isn't pushchair friendly.

About 2 minutes into the trail we found our first witch, a red one high up in a tree with sunglasses and an umbrella. It was a pretty impressive witch. The kids were so excited as we jotted the colour down on the word search but we weren't hanging around as they were off to find more.

There are a few routes you can chose from but they all lead back to the same place so you are sure to do every route possible. There are lots of steps which as it had been raining were a little slippy but every staircase had a hand rail which they definitely needed.

The whole wood is magnificent with so much to see and so much for the kids to explore that they never got bored. I did have to have a few words with Finley as he kept running off which then resulted in him falling over and in a place like this he could really hurt himself if he wasn't careful. There were stepping stones, bridges to cross, branches to climb and little caves to explore all whilst keeping an eye out for the witches.

There are 8 witches in total, some with faces just hanging out in the trees and some that have crash landed into the woods and their faces are hidden. They are all so well decorated and made that they look like real witches which makes the experience that much better as the kids think its real. They aren't scary witches so the kids weren't scared in the slightest.

About half way round the kids were getting hungry and we managed to find a quiet spot off the main track that had a couple of benches where we stopped for our lunch. This was a good find as it was a dead end so not many people passed us while we ate our lunch.

After lunch we set off again to find more witches and in the end we found all but one, the pink one but managed to guess the colour by the word search. We were in the wood for a good 3 hours and in that time the kids didn't get bored once, if anything they were pretty sad to be leaving the wood.

We headed to the café to receive the kids prizes which was a Halloween coin and a spooky wand. Even though we had only purchased two trail packs the lady in the café kindly gave us 3 so all 3 kids could have something, which I thought was very kind of her. There is a little park just across from the café which we popped into and spent about 10 minute here before heading home.

I would totally recommend this place to anyone, with children or not. Older kids or younger because it has something for everyone and even after Halloween without the witches it would be an adventure in itself. 

* I was not paid in anyway for this review, I just wanted to shared an amazing day out. We paid full price to enter and all views are 100% my own. *