Crieff Hydro Hotel, Crieff

We spent a week here in August and sadly had to buy fleeces due to the fickle nature of the Scottish ‘summer’...! We stayed in one of the Ben Chalets, the cheapest self-catering option - chosen for nostalgic reasons, as I’d stayed in one during a 70s family holiday. The interior was sweetly unchanged, though updated with a modern kitchen and satellite TV. One of the bedrooms is on a mezzanine just upstairs from the living area so it was easier to put the kids in the one bedroom with a door. Unfortunately my daughter kept bedwetting but the maids were pretty understanding about the frequent linen changes. Overall the service was excellent. The chalets are in the woods up the hill from the main hotel so there’s quite a steep walk when you want to go anywhere. We enjoyed sampling some of the ridiculously wide range of activities on offer. It was strangely hard to get hold of a definitive price list but the rule of thumb seemed to be that activities requiring an instructor (such as horse-riding, quad bikes) cost more, but booking equipment for things like tennis or golf was pretty cheap. You could easily spend a fortune here if you spent all your time on the estate (we escaped on some day trips). My husband discovered he’s a crack archer, my 6-year-old daughter developed a taste for the golf driving range, and my thighs took about a week to recover after a pony trek. We went swimming a lot – there’s a toasty warm pool for wee ones and the large pool has a daily kids’ hour with inflatable slide from 3-4pm, but we found it less crowded in the late morning. The price includes six hours of free childcare per day for 2-12 year olds in the Big Country kids club. You can choose two of three different 3-hour sessions – morning, afternoon or evening. We only used this a few times but found the staff to be pretty good, considering they’re dealing with brand new kids all the time. It allowed us to spend one horizontal morning swimming, steaming and snoozing in the much-recommended Victorian Spa. It’s a quiet, child-free space, designed to give that old-fashioned ‘taking the waters’ feel, but quite small and filled up pretty quickly. This led to a shortage of sun loungers, which was a shame for some of the parents grabbing precious downtime away from the kids (we were lucky). There are good cafés and restaurants on offer, though nothing very cheap (4-star prices…). The Hub was handy when we collected hungry kids from Big Country (they don’t do meals) and we had one nice early evening dinner at the Brasserie. For a change of scene we drove down into Crieff a couple of times and ate at the fantastic family-friendly Delivino cafe. It’s worth checking their website for deals before you book. Verdict? Good for active families with kids aged probably 7+ to get the most out of it.