13 Best Adventure Days Out In Derbyshire

These are the two halves of the same subject and our records list them separately, so treat the pairing as a choice rather than an accident. One is a museum, indoors, where the story is told; the other is a mine, where you go into the thing itself. A child who needs to touch and stand inside something will get far more from the mine, and the museum will make more sense to them afterwards than before. If you only do one, do the one with the hole in the ground.

Our records hold nothing about steps, gradients or how far underground each one goes, and those are exactly the details that decide it, so this is a question to put to the site itself rather than to a listing. What is generally true is that a large open chamber is easier on a small child than a narrow passage, and that being underground is either thrilling or frightening with very little middle ground. Ask a five-year-old how they feel about the dark before you buy anything.

Our record flags it outdoor and not indoor, so plan it as a day in the open air with everything that implies about weather and footwear. On a list where most of the well-known entries are below ground, that makes it the entry that behaves differently, and the one to choose when somebody in the party has firmly declined to go into a cave. It sits in the same part of the county as several of the others, which makes swapping one for the other easy.

Less than almost anywhere else in our records. A cave is the same temperature and the same experience regardless of what is happening on the hillside above it, so five of the entries here are effectively weatherproof and six of the thirteen record indoor space overall. What rain does affect is Go Ape Buxton and Matlock Bath Treasure Trail, both of which want a dry day. In this county, a bad forecast changes which half of the list you use rather than whether you go.