Category × County
8 Best Adventure Days Out In Dorset
Know what this list is before you drive anywhere. Five of Dorset's eight adventure records are Treasure Trails — Dorchester Mystery Treasure Trail, Poole Mystery Treasure Trail, The Weymouth 4 Kids Treasure Trail, The Corfe 4 Kids Treasure Trail and Bournemouth Gardens Treasure Hunt Trail — walking routes with clues rather than places you arrive at. They work here because Dorset's towns are compact, coastal and worth walking round on their own account. Only two entries are destinations: The Tunnel Tree Tops, which puts you up in the branches, and Slades Farm Skate Park, which is a skate park and suits a very particular child.
Top adventure days out in Dorset
Showing 1–8 of 8
AdventureThe Tunnel Tree Tops
AdventureSymondsbury Estate Farm Animals Easter Trail
Activity CentresSlades Farm Skate Park
AdventureThe Corfe 4 Kids Treasure Trail
AdventureDorchester Mystery Treasure Trail
AdventureBournemouth Gardens Treasure Hunt Trail
AdventurePoole Mystery Treasure Trail
AdventureThe Weymouth 4 Kids Treasure Trail
One further record is a dated seasonal trail with a year attached to it, so it is not a plan for this weekend whatever the listing says. The real field is therefore small, and padding it out would help nobody. The upside is that the trails cover the county's best-known towns, so a family staying anywhere along the coast has one on the doorstep of wherever they are already going.
Adventure Days Out in Dorset: FAQs
Is this list really mostly trails?
Yes, and it is better to know that now than at the car park. Five of eight are Treasure Trails, which means the Dorset adventure category is largely something you print or download and then walk, rather than somewhere with a gate and an admission desk. If you were expecting activity centres, this is not the county page that will give you them.
Which entry is an actual destination?
The Tunnel Tree Tops is the one that behaves like an attraction, with something built for you to go up into, and it tops the eight on rating. Slades Farm Skate Park is the other physical site, though a skate park only earns the trip if you have a child already on a board or a scooter who wants to be among others doing it. Everything else is a route.
Do the trails work with young children?
Two of them carry a name that says so, being marked for kids specifically, and those are the ones to start with. The general rule is that a trail is as long as the town it covers, and a five-year-old will run out before the clues do. Plan to abandon halfway without treating it as a failure — a trail is not a ticket, so stopping costs you nothing but the walk back.
Why does one entry have a year in its name?
Because it is a dated seasonal event that has been captured as a permanent record, which is a known weakness in listings of this kind. It refers to a specific run rather than something you can turn up to now. We have left it out of the useful count for this page, and you should too: eight records, seven real options, and five of those are trails.