If you go down to the woods today...

You'll be in for a 'tree-mendous' surprise. Well, you will be very soon (hopefully)...

You may remember in a previous blog [dens and treehouses], we were asking visitors to Wray Castle for their dream treehouse ideas as part of the next phase of development of the play trail. Throughout the summer, there have been some fantastic designs submitted in the castle. Both the young and the old have been sharpening their colouring pencils, putting pen to paper and coming up with some weird and wonderful designs. Here is just a selection of the hundreds of designs we got:

Slides were very popular!

Building a treehouse inside the tree trunk!

Some of the designs submitted were by 'big' kids!

Perhaps this could be phase 2 of developments?

So we got our thinking caps on to work out the best way to combine all these super ideas, but that suited the tree we were thinking of building the treehouse around. 

The victim!

The time has finally come, many of the materials have been gathered… and work has commenced!

There was a lot of head scratching to get to this stage..!

Intricate joinery!

Can you guess what it is yet? We almost have a flat platform to work from! Ready for the addition of the treehouse on top...

We hope to build more than just a treehouse…it is going to be castle themed, have two floors, arrow slits, a fireman’s pole and a slide.. giving a unique view of Wray Castle and in winter, down to the lake!

Come on down and have a play for yourself when we finish… Unfortunately, we are at the mercy of the weather here in Cumbria, so providing we don’t get blizzards and more flooding we hope to have the treehouse up and running in the February half term! This treehouse has been part funded by the proceeds from the Cadbury's Easter Egg trail, so thanks to everyone for taking part and enabling us to build this!

An unusual view of the castle...