Pumpkin Picking at The Pumpkin House

Most pumpkin patches send you into a field. Here you walk into a wooden house decorated with more than 1,000 pumpkins and choose yours straight off the shelves, which makes the picking part quick, dry and easy to manage with small children. There is a Mini Pumpkin House alongside it for younger visitors.

Every pumpkin is for sale and priced according to its size, and each one comes with a free leaflet on how to carve it, cook it and grow your own the following year. Entry to the site is free and no booking is needed, so the only thing you have to spend is whatever you choose to take home.

There is a fair amount to do without paying anything more. Hay bale towers, tractor tyre sand pits, mud kitchens and hay play are all free, as are family games including hoopla, welly wanging and tin can alley. A pop-up café serves coffee, hot chocolate and ice cream.

The paid extras are a 6-acre maize maze and Ghoulish Golf, a Halloween version of the nine-hole mini adventure golf. On the opening weekend of 10 and 11 October there is also a Medieval Weekend, with catapult, archery and coin striking, charged per person on the gate.

The farm is run by a third-generation farming family, there is a large free car park, and dogs on a lead are welcome.