Heatherton World of Activities — Attraction in St. Florence

We had driven past this place many times and I’d always dismissed it. My feeling was that it would be a good way to spend loads of money, what with it being (effectively) a “pay per ride” kinda thing. However, my son had one request of our recent trip…to play crazy golf, so we decided to do a day here after reading some fab reviews. We plumped for a 40 credit family pass as we had no idea how much we would need, and I still thought we might end up tipping the pass up with loads of extra credit. However, we came away from the day with 14 of our credits remaining so can go back another day to use them, which is good.

Given I was expecting to use all the credits up, why did we come away with some left? Well we didn’t do the go karting in the end as there were a lot of people waiting and it didn’t feel like a good use of the day queuing for something we could always do somewhere else with a specific time slot. The second reason was the zip lines and the amount of time queuing for that. It looks like you should maybe be waiting 10 or 15 minutes but we ended up waiting over an hour for a 20 second zip, which obviously used a lot of time.

My advice would be to do go karting and/or zip line stuff first if you want to do it and beat the queues as pretty much everything else didn’t have significant wait time on. Crazy golf and hedge maze we just went straight into. Bumper boats had about a 20-30 minute wait but they were so much fun. Better than I expected and a longer go than you’d think. Dragon slide was also good but it’s over very quickly. Ask the guy who pushes you off to make sure you get a good spin as it makes all the difference.

We took a picnic so can’t comment on the food. Drink prices probably as you’d expect at £2.20 for a fizzy bottle. Ice creams also at expected park prices but okay. If you have refillable water bottles then we did find some sinks (after buying water!) in the cafe next to the zip wire.

All in all a very nice day out. Only reason for four stars rather than five is the couple of problematic queuing areas, but if you manage your day to do those first then you’d probably...

Excellent day out for the kids ages 7-13.

I recommend buying tickets online in advance we brought the family credits. You can buy more there but it works out cheaper if you purchase in advance. Our tickets was valid for 6 months but if you visit online and see what activities there are you can gather how much tickets you'll potentially need.

The activities are fairly priced via credits

We did archery which had practice rounds and then a competition round. Crazy golf and the zip wires was a big hit including the the dragon slide. There are 3 activities that are weather dependant so if its raining these will be closed but it was good fun and a dry day when we attended

Dogs are allowed as long as kept on the lead

I highly recommend the maze we let the kids run wild and finished before them but was able to laugh at them getting frustrated by all their wrong turns when we reached the lookout tower.

There are places to buy food but we found this expensive which is the case in most places these days so we took a packed lunch and left it in a cool bag in the car. It's not a far walk to the car park so this was OK for us.

There was a huge issue with wasps and flys around the park which we thought they could have some fly or wasp preventions up however their bins was wheelie bins which I suppose was a step to helping prevent these.

The tokens/credits are monitored on cards that the ride monitors tick off we think this could be improved to wrist bands with a different token marker as these are easily lost as you need to keep them on you for the activities. One family had lost there's during our visit.

All in all it was a great day and we stayed majority of the park opening time. Queues was not that long and the staff seemed very pleasant and...

We were really impressed by Heatherton. Arrived just before opening, parked very easily. I’d pre-booked our credits and had them on my phone so this was easily scanned and turned into a pink ‘credit card’. We started at Adventure Golf and walked straight on at 10.05am. Took the four of us just over an hour, great fun. Swapped sides and our boys (14 and 11) went on the Zip Line over the road. They waited about twenty minutes for their turns, after the safety briefings etc. Really impressed by the staff here. We ate our picnic (hiding from the crows) then the boys went on the Dragon Slide. Just a couple of minutes wait here. The boys thought this was great - much faster than it looks. We then crossed back for pistol shooting. We waited maybe 15 minutes here as the group before us had only just gone in. We all really enjoyed this and thought Sam was excellent. Next was archery, again, lovely staff (although we did hear him say Up The Villa, can’t have everything!). Our boys then went on the Bumper Boats and loved these, so much fun, and only a few minutes to wait for their turn. Last was Walk On Water. The boys waited maybe ten minutes here and loved it but found it utterly exhausting! They were very glad we’d decided to leave this activity to last! We paid £89 for our 30 credits and used every single one. We were at Heatherton for just over five hours with not much queuing at all (we’ve been to the Merlin theme parks as previous passholders and have done a lot of waiting in line in our time!). We all enjoyed it and found the range of activities meant there really was something for everyone. Fairly priced and excellent fun. Highly...