During our stay in Barrow in Furness we visited South Lakes Safari Zoo at the Southern tip of the Lake District. It's easy to find and well sign posted from the A590 main road and only about a five minute drive from the Travelodge.
The park has a reasonably sized car park, but it's a bit awkward as one side is filled with skips and large rubbish bins and piles of old pallets. If these were removed it would make extra parking, particularly over the summer months.
Entry to the zoo is £15.50 for an adult, one child aged 3-15 years is free if entering with a full priced adult otherwise they are £9 each. Under 3's are free and senior citizens are £11. We paid just £15.50 for the three of us as we were able to pick up a discount voucher prior to our visit and the little is still classed as free.
If you have them, you can also use Tesco Club card vouchers towards your entry prices but you do need to exchange them prior to attending. The park has a good selection of animals which all seem to have plenty of space and seem happy and clean. There are parts of the park that you can walk amongst the animals, allowing you to get very close to beautiful wild animals. I really like this idea but it is a little inconvenient if you have a child in a pushchair and you have to leave the pushchair outside and carry your child, change bag and any valuables. There are a variety of shows and talks on during the day some of which include the chance to feed the animals. You do need to pay extra to do this but you can pay for a wrist band at entry that allows you a couple of feeds during your visit. You can check out the timings for the talks on posters around the park, we managed to catch the giraffe, penguin and lemur shows all of which we informative and interesting to watch. There are plenty of seats and picnic benches to eat at if you take a packed lunch with you but if you decide to eat on site there's a restaurant called the Maki restaurant. The restaurant itself looks fab with a huge terrace through some double doors if the weather is warm enough to eat outside. Sadly we weren't very impressed with the food or prices. The menu implies that food is homemade and freshly cooked, my chips were oven chips and the sandwiches in the little mans packed lunch were dry. Prices were high too, with drinks costing £1.70 for a small bottle of juice. If you are visiting with a large family I would definitely recommend bringing your own food and drink. The little man enjoyed being able to see the animals and get up quite close. The feeding platform for the giraffes were one of our favorite parts of the day. We've seen giraffes numerous times before but until you're on their level it's hard to appreciate how beautiful they actually are. There's a small train that runs through the park but it wasn't on during out visit. Other than the animals there isn't too much else in the park to do. I'd have liked to have seen a play area or at least some open space to allow children to run off some of their energy. There's a rather nice gift shop on site stocked with lots of things suitable for all budgets including art work and wooden toys. After much deliberation and running round the store the little man picked up two animal figures for under £5. Overall we enjoyed our day. I'm not sure I'd have been as impressed if I'd paid £31 for entry on top of the £20 for food. We enjoyed seeing the wide variety of animals and the size of the park was good, meaning we spent a good three hours wandering round.