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Erddig’s Apple Festival began with a simple ambition to rescue and preserve old apple varieties and mark National Apple Day which is 21 October.

Before visiting Erddig this weekend I had no idea that there were so many varieties of apple and that 180 apple varieties are grown at Erddig itself!

What I wasn’t really expecting however was that the event at Erddig would be so popular. Granted we went on a very sunny Sunday and the Saturday had been quite a wash out, but they attracted over 5000 visitors that day.

We wandered into the Courtyard at Erddig, met up with The Ordinary Lovely and her family and collected our Toffee Apple Trail sheets. The idea behind the trail was to find 6 apples across the gardens (marked on the map) and then collect your toffee apple prize.

So we set off on our wander round the gardens to find the apples but we kept getting distracted by other activities!  The first activity to catch our eye was the Apple & Spoon race they were just putting out:

Our 5 children took this event very seriously and I’m pretty sure we had to have the right number of races to make sure all the older ones won!

There was some archery set up for the older ones to try too, although this did require a small fee per person so we steered the kids away in favour of the rest of the Apple Trail, however then we stumbled upon the dragon!

Created by Simon O’Rourke Tree Carving who creates quite a few of the custom wood carvings for Erddig, we just had to let the kids sit on it! It was a work of art and it moved!

As the children took it in turn to ride the dragon, we noticed that the puppet show was due to start, so we wandered over to get their toffee apple prizes so they could eat those whilst watching the show in the sun! If we hadn’t been driving I think we would have all sampled the rather appetising cider on offer too!

After the show finished we made our way to the Adventure Playground in the Wolf Den. As this is usually the kids favourite part of Erddig I was amazed that it had taken us from 10.30am – 1pm to get there – testament to the rest of the activities on offer that day.

We finished the day with a long play on the fabulous wooden playground, chatting and wondering if that was finally the last day of Summer!

NB: We were invited to Erddig by the National Trust however we are already members so covered our own admission.