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Lightwater Valley for families

This Summer I took my three little thrill-seekers to Lightwater Valley Theme Park in Ripon during our stay at Boroughbridge Camping and Caravan Club Site, which is around 15-20 minute drive away. Having not been to Lightwater Valley before I didn’t know very much about the theme park and was very pleasantly surprised with how much there was available for children of their ages (2, 4 and 6) to go on and how family friendly it is. We also went with my parents and my sister and her two young children. This photograph shows the different rides available for different ages/heights of children.

Each ride clearly displays any height restrictions and the colour coding really helped our children understand what they could and couldn’t go on.

The rides for children largely consist of variations of carousel – teacups, clowns, ladybirds, safari animals, pirate ships, etc – but our kids were all perfectly content with this type of ride. It was lovely that there were also swinging chairs and a small pirate ship: smaller versions of other rides in the theme park. My kids also loved the caterpillar rollercoaster (the Little Dipper) which made them squeal with delight! It was special for them to be able to sit next to each other on many of the rides as they didn’t always need to be accompanied by an adult.

We were fortunate to visit on a glorious day and so the theme park positively shone. The area around the lake was particularly nice and the children enjoyed the gentle train around it. The footpaths around the park are flat and it’s easy to get around with a large pram.

There are a number of benches and places where you can sit down and have a picnic so we took advantage of that in order to cut costs. However, there are a number of food outlets but I was relieved that there weren’t too many of them or too many gift shops either!

We were very surprised that the queues were short for every ride, despite it being peak season, and the children got a decent turn on each ride. A tip: if you can, go with the grandparent so that parents can also get a turn on some rides! We were impressed that senior citizens tickets were only £5 each when booked online which is a very reasonable price as my parents weren’t interested in going on the rides except when they needed to accompany the children. I do find it unfair when adults have to pay full price at theme parks when they won’t be able to go on any of the rides because otherwise there would be no one to supervise their children or because the queues are so long that it’s unfair on whichever adult you leave the children with! There are only a few rides at Lightwater Valley that are better suited for older teens and adults but with no queues it is easy to nip off for a few minutes and have a turn, making the day much more fun for the adults that enjoy that sort of thing.

In our opinion, Lightwater Valley is a gem of a theme park. It’s good value for money and we easily filled the day exploring it. The children had a fantastic time and therefore all of us adults found it relaxing and enjoyable. It is definitely somewhere we’ll go back to and would recommend to other families with young children.