Longleat Review - Read About Longleat From a Kid's Point of View

A visit to Longleat with a teenager and a 'tweenager

Longleat aims squarely at family vacationers, with attractions geared to entertain both children and adults. We took along two friends, 13-year-old Lizzie and 11-year-old Nick, to see what they thought of the place and to help us review Longleat. Neither had ever visited Longleat though both had seen the popular BBC television program, Animal Park, filmed there.

Essential Information

• Address:Longleat Safari Park
  Longleat, Warminster
  Wiltshire BA12 7NJ
• Telephone: +44 (0)1985 844328
• Plan a visit to Longleat
• Visit their website

The Pros

• The Safari Park
• The Monkey Jungle
• The Hedge Maze
• Helpful, friendly staff

The Cons:

• Some attractions were too crowded
• Long queues to get in and to enter the Safari Park
• You need to buy a book or have a DVD player in your car (to play the DVD handed out with your ticket) to identify all the animals in the Safari Park
• The food generated a big thumbs down from all of us
• Toilets were too few and too hard to find
• Too much to take in on one visit

We had to wait until late afternoon to get into the Safari Park but everyone agreed it was well worth the wait to be confronted by curiously smiling camels, approached by nonchalant lions and to see the park's new Siberian Tigers lounge around. We somehow managed to miss the new warthogs and the zebras. And much to our disappointment, the famous Canadian timber wolves were all sleeping. But the animals are kept as naturally as possible and you see what they happen to be doing when you happen to be passing.

Lizzie judged the Safari Park the best part of Longleat. "The animals were really cool and I saw lots of animals I never saw before."

See more pictures of Longleat Safari Park
Check out Longleat's Animal Babies

Longleat's Hedge Maze is terrific. It is huge and confusing and, according to park staff, most people spend more than an hour finding their way in and out of it. Even when you make your way to the middle, where there is a tower for looking out over the whole Maze, it is still impossible to plot a way out.

We lost Nick, who was more of an adventurer than the rest of us, for about half an hour. Now and then we would catch a glimpse of him on one of the bridges or platforms that rise above the hedges, but we couldn't figure out how to get to him.

Eventually, he became bored with evading us and stayed put long enough for us to catch him. Nick's advice about the Hedge Maze - "Stay together in the Maze. Stay together!"

Longleat has several other mazes:

• King Arthur's Mirror Maze -"I wouldn't bother with the mirror maze," says Lizzie. "It was not big enough and it was too crowded." We all seconded her opinion.
• The Blue Peter Maze - Blue Peter is a popular British children's TV program. Our lot were too old for that so we didn't try it out.

Nick's favorite (and mine) was the Monkey Jungle. Longleat's troupe of Rhesus monkeys are like brazen hooligans, looking for trouble. They hitch rides on cars passing through and pick away anything loose (rubber, radio antennae, roof racks, plastic spare tire covers). While mothers and babies were grooming in the trees and on the hills, the boys systematically marauded, going from car to car. We watched a station wagon lose it's badly taped and repaired roof rack to a pack of monkeys working as a team.

We thought they were hysterical but the playful monkeys can be so destructive that drivers who are a bit precious about their cars are invited to take a route that bypasses the Monkey Jungle all together.

See more pictures of Longleat's Monkey Hooligans