 Deer Park Lodges
Rebecca Blunt and family upgraded their usual caravan holiday to a
forest lodge in Deerpark, Cornwall. Definitely the way to go if you love
peace and quiet!
Imagine sitting on your own private balcony, sipping wine and listening
to nothing but birds calling and ripples swishing across a lily pond.
That's pretty much how we spent every evening of our blissful week at
Deerpark, deep in a verdant Cornish forest.
We were desperate to cram in a holiday between a stressful house move
and our daughter's first day at school, and our only aim was to relax.
We certainly picked the right place!
Deerpark, near Liskeard, is one of three Forest Holiday sites run by
the Forestry Commission, the others being in Yorkshire and Scotland.
We booked a standard cabin, and although it was the most basic in comparison
to the superior and VIP versions, the fixtures and fittings were almost
irrelevant under the dominating two-storey-high windows that filled the
cabin with streaming sunshine.
Our double room, in a downstairs corner, was a little poky but Rachel,
3, and Kyffin, 19 months, loved their enormous attic room with its own
indoor balcony.
 We
are veterans of many trips to the furthest tip of Cornwall but had never
explored the top end of the county.
Deerpark was a great base from which to get to the sandy beaches of Looe,
the Eden Project and the Lost Gardens of Heligan, as well as some fantastic
parks with bags of space for our little ones to run off their energy.
They particularly liked Porfell Animal Park, just a five- minute drive
from our forest cabin, where they stared in amazement at the stripey-tailed
lemurs and laughed at the donkey called Rebecca - "Just like Mummy!"
A Forest Holidays break is definitely for you if you want to get away
from it all, and not the place to go if you expect a bar, entertainment
and a babysitting service.
Our site, tucked a mile into the forest, had no mobile phone reception
and only terrestrial TV stations. The tiny reception area sold locally
produced bread, milk, scones and butter but the nearest supermarket was
about five miles away.
The site has just one washing machine serving 40-odd cabins and no iron
(as I discovered when I ran out of tee-shirts). To us, however, this all
added to the attraction. For "quiet," definitely don't read "boring."
The friendly and helpful site assistants run daily activities for children
such as archery, bat hunts and a boat race where you first have to make
your own transport from recycled materials!
Families can also hire bikes, complete with baby seats, to explore the
numerous sign-posted forest trails, although the charges, ranging up to
£63 for a week for an adult bike, seemed a bit pricey to us.
 The
only gripe we had during an otherwise perfect week was the standard of
cleanliness, particularly in the kitchen.
Staff were very concerned when we complained and arranged a good spring
clean, but I got the distinct impression that, coming towards the end
of the season, standards had slipped quite dramatically.
Weighed against the sheer delight our son and daughter took in the cabin,
the trees and the friendly ducks, it wouldn't stop us returning to Deerpark,
but it did take the shine off an otherwise perfect retreat.
We paid £399 for a 4-6 berth standard cabin, in the first week of September
but just a week earlier the price was £799 and for such a large sum I'd
have expected the cabin to be sparkling.
www.forestholidays.co.uk
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