Chirk Castle – Summer of Play, August 2024

Our first Summer of Play event in the National Trust calendar was at Chirk Castle. We’d already visited Chirk Castle a month or so back (which you can read about here), so we didn’t do the full castle tour this time. Today we were here to check out the Summer of Play and archery event they had on. Plus, there was an area of the castle that was newly opened for the event.

The summer of play event was mainly at the car park level of Chirk Castle. They’d opened up a field at the back and put some fun and games in there to encourage families along. Inside were some small games like hula hoops, stilts, skipping ropes and spinning plates. The next area was set up for some building, with several pallet bases and a large number of randomly shaped wooden building blocks for the kids to build whatever they could imagine. Ours built a castle; others just went for height.

There was a large stack of hay bales at the back for climbing on and a fun hay bale maze at the centre to play in. Not the sort you could get lost in, you could see over the top! The kids also took advantage of the fancy dress area with costumes for knights and maidens, and a small castle playhouse for the littler ones.

We made our way up the hill to Chirk Castle, making sure I grabbed my usual coffee on the way. The kids had a quick lap of the playground which has some climbing frames, swings, slides and those little spinning seats which Elliott always seems to get stuck spinning.

Outside the castle was the main reason we wanted to come here today. Archery.

Sponsored by Blaidd Field Archery Wrexham, they were offering you a chance to try your hand at archery, with 5 arrows for £1. We’d only ever tried archery at Center Parcs once, so 5 arrows for a quid seemed like the perfect excuse to try it again. Kitted out with the wrist guard, Me and Evan lined up for our turn and there was even an area for Elliott, aged 6, to have a try!

There were several rows of traditional circular targets for the adults and older kids to try, set a little further back, and for the smaller kids they had some bigger targets, closer up, featuring trolls and dragons. Great fun, an absolute bargain at a pound and we all loved trying it out! I didn’t do too badly on my first try and Evan did really well. Elliott was just happy to be firing a bow and arrow. The staff were friendly and helpful, so he did manage to hit the target a few times!

We’ve been in Adams tower and down to the dungeon several times before so didn’t see them this time, but they had opened the East Wing as part of the Summer of Play event, so we took a look around. There were several rooms with games and activities for the kids.

They had a fancy-dress area, hopscotch in the corridor, drawing portraits and soft play fort building amongst other arts and crafts. The activities were laid out amongst fake packing boxes to make it look like they were moving in (or out, I suppose), but that was exactly how it looked. Every room was empty and stripped bare of any colour or character it may have had – aside from one of the fireplaces which had some intricate design work.

It may have been that it is being renovated and is empty because of that, so they thought they’d add some activities in to make use of the space. There was just something off about it, but there were plenty of people looking around and kids enjoying the activities. I hope they can add to this area in the future.

We brought the usual sandwiches and snacks, so we sat on the lawn outside the castle and ate our lunch while enjoying our own summer of fun – we took a frisbee. There’s plenty of garden space to get a decent throw too. There were plenty of families enjoying the nice weather with picnics or playing football here.

We took a quick stroll down the garden past the summerhouse and played a bit more frisbee before heading back up for another look around the castle gardens and the archery display. The queues had picked up now, so we were glad we got here early as it was quite a popular event.

With a quick look around the Vegetable Garden to see what they were growing this year, we headed out. Just a quick visit today as it’s on our doorstep, and with the National Trust pass we can visit regularly. They were also due some medieval reenactments in the near future which we were planning on coming back for, but rain stopped play on those for us. We’ll definitely be back next time they’re on though.