The best UK holidays for family bonding
How do you pick a trip that suits families with older offspring and supplies adventures you'll all talk about forever? Here's how (and where).
We’ve just come back from our first family holiday abroad together for many years. With four kids it’s tricky to fund a foreign trip so we usually go home to my home county Cornwall but this half term, hot on the heels of No 2 leaving home, we went to Porto San Stefano in Italy’s Monte Argentino region.
The age gap of our kids is 11 to 20 and finding something you can do that suits those who don’t get up until 1pm and those that are up with the lark is a challenge but I was determined to have us all under one roof for a week, to get the band together as it were and rub a little healing balm on the empty nest bruise.
It went surprisingly well despite the remoteness of the villa (I had to hide on the floor of the car to avoid seeing the sheer drops as we navigated perilous cliffside roads) and I was even forgiven for a 22km bike ride through a forest because we got to see Flamingos in the wild at the end of it. We played cards and bananagrams, we cooked pasta together and we spent hours in one of our favourite holiday hideouts: the foreign supermarket. Orbetello COOP was in fact a highlight of the trip.
It was a slow paced holiday. Wifi was intermittent and out of season Italy is a very quiet destination. The sun shone for three days but for four the grey clouds rolled in. And yet it worked. Boredom was embraced, the pace pottered along.
Finding a holiday that works for all is always a challenge but when you pick one that at first appears at odds with what everyone seems to need you often have the best adventures.
When I got back from the trip a wonderful new family travel book had landed on my desk which seemed to embrace this notion, and it was aimed at UK holiday makers which makes things easier on the budget. “Slow Travel Family Breaks: Perfect Escapes in Britain’s Special Places” by Jane Anderson and Holly Tuppen is a really useful guide so I asked Jane to write for us here on the notion of slow travel with older children, and to give us specific recommendations for your trips next year.
How to bond on family holidays
By Jane Anderson
(Slow Travel Family Breaks: Perfect Escapes in Britain’s Special Places) Buy Here
Having been editor of a magazine called Family Traveller for seven years and a travel writer for many years before that, I’ve been able to do a lot of travelling with my kids, Scarlett, now aged 18 and Finlay, 15. Even though we’ve been to some far-flung places, our UK adventures just seemed to be getting better and better, exploring everywhere from the Scilly Isles to the Cairngorms. It also sat well with the notion that we should be flying less to ease our carbon footprint. At the beginning of 2020 I bumped into Adrian Phillips, the MD at Bradt Guides, an independent travel book publisher set up by the awesome Hilary Bradt back in 1974, and half-jokingly said, how about I write a family travel guidebook? To my surprise he was enthusiastic and between us we felt that a book about UK family travel would fit well into Bradt’s Slow Travel series. Then the pandemic hit and of course research ground to a halt. I decided to bring on board a co-author – the wonderful Holly Tuppen, who has two lovely boys and specialises in sustainable travel. A big part of the book is to really get under the skin of a place – taking time to experience nature and local culture and opening up a space for creativity and micro-adventures. The book aims to fast-track readers to talented locals eager to pass on their knowledge of their patch and to create enriching, authentic experiences for you and your children. In the end, it took us almost three years to research, write and give birth to this book – enough time for us to have had six more kids between us! The book also comes out at a watershed moment for me as a mother and as a family travel writer. My daughter has just gone to university and my son has his GCSEs this year and a girlfriend - and more interesting things to do than travel with his mum. It’s a shift I must adjust to, but of course I still have plenty of plans to travel with them and tricks up my sleeve to entice them. My daughter is studying Fine Art, so I’m taking her to Oslo to see the new Munch Museum and Tracey Emin’s The Mother sculpture later this month. We had one of our best family holidays this summer after the A levels results came out, with the two winning ingredients of a villa with a pool in the beautiful Languedoc region of SW France, and in the company of another family with teens our kids have been friends with since they were little. I know as a parent, the way we travel with our kids constantly shifts but there are great things about travelling as a family whatever the ages of you and your children. It’s one of the most important bonding experiences you’ll ever have.
Here are some of the holiday experiences that worked best with my teens around the UK.
Highland Coo safari, Dumfries & Galloway
If you’ve ever hankered after taking your children on safari but the expense and the carbon miles were just too much to stomach, I guarantee you the next best thing is a Highland Cow safari with Kitchen Coos and Ewes where even the most moody and cynical teen will have their heart melted by these majestic creatures. The safari was created by local husband and wife team Neale and Janet McQuistin, who between them have over a 100 years of farming experience in the Galloway and Southern Ayrshire UNESCO Biosphere. They made the decision to farm for the environment rather than for food production and created their Highland Coo safari taking families out in natty covered wagons pulled by Neale at the wheel of a tractor and Janet in the back enthusiastically explaining how the coos don’t need high grade grasses to feed, so the land can be rewilded, and how their poo is a great fertilizer and source of food for birds. It’s obvious every cow has their own personality and we learn that Eve, a shaggy white Highland cow has been a cover star of Hello! Magazine. The thing that really seals the deal for my daughter is meeting Hector Hamish - a very cute baby cow being hand reared in the barn. The safari ends with a memorable afternoon tea in the farmhouse kitchen. The whole experience is powered by the enthusiasm and hospitality of Neale and Janet.
Seaweed foraging, Guernsey
Ben Trustin, aka Vraic Man, is a bit of a superhero. Or should I say seaweed hero. As Guernsey’s only seaweed farmer, he’s a passionate campaigner for this wonder plant. His fun and educational seaweed foraging experiences take place on Soif Beach at low tide when the rock pools are at their best. He’ll get the most reluctant of teens to squidge the poppers of bladderwrack, and even take a bite, teaching everyone that seaweed is in fact nutritious as well as being a massive carbon store and fabulous fertilizer. Every slow travel experience we had seemed to link us back to nature and the environment and this one was an eye opener for my teens who now have a huge respect for seaweed.
guernseyseaweed.com
Walking with wild ponies, Lake District
Getting teens to go on a walk – even if it’s in the wild beauty of Grizedale Forest in the Lake District - is a well-known hiding to nothing. However, add in some fell ponies and hidden sculptures, and the whole thing becomes much more of a winner. Tom Lloyd inherited his father’s Hades Hill herd of 35 fell ponies and now offers walks around Grizedale Forest where families get to lead the ponies with a traditional rope halter. The beautiful walk includes a homemade picnic lunch by Grizedale Water carried by the ponies in large panniers, and the search for sculptures hidden deep in the forest including Andy Goldworthy’s ‘Taking a Wall for a Walk’, an awesome winding drystone wall – part forest snake, part swirling moss-covered boundary. My daughter actually hates walking, but the combination of the ponies and the art, did the trick.
fellpony.co.uk, forestryengland.uk/grizedale
Woodworking in the National Forest
If there’s one part of the UK that captures the spirit of slow family travel, it’s the National Forest, Britain’s greatest story of reforestation. This manmade, purposefully planted forest straddles Derbyshire, Leicestershire and Staffordshire where black coal mines and clay pits have been transformed over the past 30 years into a green playground. A highlight for families with teens is Greenwood Days near Calke Abbey, headed up by the lovely Peter Wood (no pun intended). His canopied woodland workshop offers over 60 courses in green woodworking including willow weaving, basketry and spoon carving. The best part is that all ages can collaborate and create an entire Windsor chair or something simpler like three-legged stool from the logs around them. I could see the surprise on my teens faces as they worked the wood and transformed it from a log to an actual thing! They also got to create their own pizzas and put them in the smoking outdoor pizza oven and make endless cups of tea from the blackened kettle over the fire pit.
greenwooddays.co.uk
Snorkelling with seals, Scilly Isles
The first time we caught the Scillonian III ferry to the Scilly Isles when my kids were little, I’m sure they thought we were overseas. There’s more than a hint of the tropics in these isles 28 miles off the tip of Cornwall. And more than that, there’s a spot of time travelling too as things really do feel like you’ve stepped back a few decades. The lack of traffic is liberating, and when you head off the main island of St Mary’s to sister island St Martin’s (one of five inhabited isles), the remoteness is palpable. The effect on teens is interesting. The powerful and unavoidable beauty of nature seems to pervade their souls, and even their twitching mobile phone fingers become less furtive. Book an extraordinary activity such as snorkelling with Atlantic Grey Seals with zoologist, diving instructor and marine mammal medic Anna Brown, and teens will have no option but to seal their mobiles in a dry bag or a few hours, pull on a wetsuit and mask, and plunge into the seaweedy Atlantic for a life affirming encounter. These big, black-eyed souls will nibble your teens’ fins and take them out of whatever teenage angst is bothering them.
sealsnorkellingadventures.com