Kids in Outer London – Bocketts Farm, Leatherhead

Another entry from my nine year old daughter as she continues her school holidays.

First we paid – it was £6.40 for adults and £5.95 for kids. You get a wristband to show you have paid – mine was blue. We also paid 60p for some animal feed – and you can feed any animals without horns as long as its not horses, pigs, donkeys or chickens. So we went straight to feed the goats and sheep. Really small children will need to be careful not to get their fingers nibbled and some of the bigger goats tried to steal the entire bag of food.

After a while we went over to see a demonstration of how to milk a goat. I think the goat’s name was Coral but couldn’t tell as the man talking was American. He got two and a half pints of milk in just five minutes. We stayed in this area for a while for the separate session on animal handling and there were lots of children so it took a while for the animals to come round. First was a chicken called Charlie who was brown and very soft and had a little thing on his head. Then there was a baby goat called Lola who was white. And I didn’t hear the name of the guinea pig. There was a rabbit in a basket but we didn’t wait for it to come round.

We spent some time in the playground where they had real old tractors buried in the ground that you could climb and play on. One playground had red and yellow tractors and another had blue and green ones. There were swings and climbing frames and puzzles to climb and do. There was also a tower of tyres to climb which was fun. My favourite was the swings as they had really large comfortable seats.

We went to the snack bar and had hot chocolate with whipped cream and chocolate sprinkles as well as a chocolate chip cookie. Then we went to a wishing well which wasn’t very deep. I threw in a 2p coin. This was just next to the pig racing track. A lady came round with a board and each person had to vote who they thought would win the race – I picked orange (Greased Lightning) and Briony picked pink (Curly Sue). The winning pig was yellow. Briony’s pig got left behind – after a few metres it stopped to eat grass. My pig came last.

The best bit of the day was the pig race and feeding the animals. The web site is good too - http://www.bockettsfarm.co.uk/.

:)