5 Best Castles In Cumbria

The ones where the building rather than the garden is the attraction, so a city castle or a house with rooms to work through beats a site whose appeal is its landscape. All five are flagged indoor, but a flag does not tell you the proportion. Before you commit, look at what the site itself puts first: if the photographs are mostly of grounds and planting, that is what the visit is, and rain will take most of it away.

Sometimes, and with lowered expectations. Big designed landscapes keep their bones through the year, and walking a garden in low winter light has a quiet appeal for adults. Children rarely share it. If the trip has to happen in the colder months, choose a site where the interior can carry an hour on its own, and count whatever the garden gives you as a bonus, not the reason you came.

Less time than adults plan for, and the sort of site decides by how much. Rooms with ropes and rules run down a young child's patience quickly. Ruins, towers, walls and anything with steps last far longer, because they offer doing instead of being told. Where a site has both, start with the part that involves moving and hold the interior back for the point when everyone wants shelter.

It changes how much slack you build in rather than whether you go. Weather here moves through quickly and a written-off morning frequently turns into a usable afternoon, so a site with both indoor and outdoor parts lets you take whichever half the sky allows. That is what makes this particular list workable: with all five flagged both ways, you are choosing the order of your day rather than cancelling it.