Play
Moors Valley is a fantastic place for children to play and explore. All our play areas and structures are included in your visit.
Notice: Junior Play Area Maintenance
From 30 September to 16 October 2026
The Junior Play Area will be closed while we replace equipment that has reached the end of its lifespan and install exciting new play features.
Some sections of the wider Adventure Play Area may also close temporarily to allow safe access for machinery.
Alternative play facilities, including the Bee Hive, the Music Trail and Play Trail, remain available.
Please speak to a ranger for more information.
Play Trail
Let their imagination soar as they discover the one mile Play Trail featuring ten beautifully crafted wooden structures designed to let children explore and play freely.
Grading
We’ve graded each play structure on the Play Trail using a 5-point scale, with 1 being the lowest and 5 being the highest. The grading covers the following categories:
Imaginative – During imaginative play, experiment with decision-making, practice social skills, and engage in creative expression.
Physical – Gets you moving. Encompassing a wide range of activities, from big movements like climbing and jumping to smaller movements.
Challenging – Activities that encourage you to stretch your limits, explore new experiences, and make decisions.
Ants Nest
New for 2025 – Ants Nest has areas for both big and little explorers to engage with the world of ants.
Big Explorers
Combining all the nostalgia of our previous Ants Nest with activities for older children – climb like an ant across the structure, along the monkey bars, and down the slides. Search along the foragers trail and collect items from the forest for the investigation desk. Crawl through tunnels, or use the accessible ramp to be queen ant.
Grading
Little Explorers
For younger children, cross the bridge and explore an early years focused play complete with a slide, ramp, and balance trail. Let them learn about ants through accessible and sensory areas, and of course our handmade Ant benches lovingly restored by our rangers on site.
Grading
Enchanted Woods
Younger children can re-enact their favourite fairytale as they wander through wooden structures depicting scenes from Goldilocks and the Three Bears, Little Red Riding Hood, Snow White and Hansel and Gretel.
Admire the storyteller’s chair with its wooden books, walk through the enchanted fairytale door, splash through stone bear paw prints, make a muddy broth in a wooden cauldron, and follow the cookie stepping stones.
Grading
Woodland Rhapsody
Designed to represent the forest canopy, this musical play structure allows children to explore the noises of the forest. They can climb to the top and create bird song noises, or burrow into the tunnels below and bang the drums. Use the gravel tubes to create rain noise, and find all the other noises that you can make as you climb, slide, and crawl around.
Grading
Snake Pit
A firm favourite with generations of visitors, children can climb, clamber and wriggle through these two giant intertwining wooden snakes. A separate ‘snakes and ladders’ assembly can also be scrambled up, down and across to test their strength and endurance.
Grading
Bewildernest
Centred on the nest of a dragon, kids can explore a mysterious maze of inside tunnels representing fire, water, and wind before scaling a six-metre-high periscope look-out tower. If they dare to climb higher, they can reach the ogre’s lair before descending the steep, tubular slide.
Reaching 7.5 metres at its highest point, this is one of the largest and most challenging play areas at Moors Valley.
Grading
Hawk House
Inspired by beautiful birds of prey, Hawk House re-creates the powerful wings of a Harris hawk with its tail feathers spread out as it comes to land in the forest.
Over 18 metres in length, and standing at 5 metres high, families can take the ramp to search the belly of the hawk with its intricate sitting room complete with wooden fireplace, chair, and carved creatures. Kids can clamber up using the climbing wall or ladders and whizz down the slides at each wing tip.
Grading
Spiders
Greeted by large wooden spiders, children can hone their balancing, coordination, and problem-solving skills with a web of low-level beams, stumps, and stones to navigate.
Grading
Crocodile Crossing
With a giant crocodile head emerging from a vast wood chip swamp, kids can travel up the hill navigating the balance beams, stepping logs and an Indiana Jones style rickety bridge. This structure encourages balance, strength, confidence, and concentration.
Grading
Timber!
Welcome foresters! Make sure to get the imagination going as children can practise there seed sorting skills in our accessible forester’s cabin, then clamber over and through wood tangles to the climbable timber harvester – complete with a steering wheel, slide and scoop bucket.
Grading
Play Areas
From the Junior Play Area with its sand play fun, our nature-inspired Bee Hive or challenging wooden fortress in the Adventure Play Area, kids of all ages will love our unique play areas.
Bee Hive
Created to be fully inclusive for every family, the Bee Hive has a range of problem-solving puzzles and fun sensory activities to help children and adults understand more about the key role of bees through touch, sight, sound, and braille.
Set up as a network of hives, the wooden structure includes a double width slide, a swing, musical elements, a wide ramp and level paths making it accessible to all. There are also quiet hive areas for those requiring less stimulation.
Adventure Play Area
Older children can climb, clamber, and challenge themselves at this adventure playground with its whizzy zip line, huge space net and impressive tower fortress with firefighter poles, crossings, and long tube slide. It also has a selection of swings, including a large flatbed one, a wibbly wobbly double width slide to explore, and plenty of space to run around.
Junior Play Area
Surrounded by sand, infants will be enthralled with the obstacle course, gentle climbing nets and wooden house with its bucket pulleys, turning wheels and small firefighter poles.
Designed to make sure little ones can explore and experiment, the play area also comes complete with gentle swings and a small spinner to help them build their motor skills, balance, and spatial awareness. They can also spot and wave to passengers as the miniature steam train weaves its way past.
Remember to bring your bucket and spade.
Music Trail
The Music Trail around Moors Lake provides an enjoyable way for little ones to explore and understand music.
Through musical play, children can hone their hand-eye coordination and fine motor skills as they try out the beautifully tuned tubular and flat xylophones and chimes found at various points on this one-mile loop.
Gruffalo Sculptures
If you venture into the deep dark wood you may bump into the Gruffalo and the Gruffalo’s Child plus other characters from Julia Donaldson’s fantastic story.
Each wooden sculpture has been carved in a different position – can you find them all?
Located in the Gruffalo picnic area, your little ones will love meeting Mouse, Owl, Fox, Snake and Squirrel as well as the Gruffalo and the Gruffalo’s child.
