Nice day out in an intensive-agricultural version of countryside heaven (Cairnie Fruit Farm (Cupar, Fife))

Member Name: worst_trip

Product:	Cairnie Fruit Farm (Cupar, Fife)
Date:	26/08/09 (46 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Good facilities, with cafe and play area for kids

Disadvantages: Management's (apparent) utterly lax attitude to child health and safety

Cairnie Fruit Farm's been a little local gem of a pick-your-own place in Fife for decades, but in recent years they've been branching out as a childrens' play-park as well and word has spread so that now people are coming from far and wide to visit it. People from as far afield as Arbroath in Angus and even in - shock! Glasgow! - have now heard of, and travel miles and miles to go there for a day out.

What it's gained in popularity is has perhaps lost in genuine charm. That publicity picture accompanying this review that you see of sunlit strawberry fields under a blue sky, with golden straw between the rows of fruit bushes - that's all gone now. Yes, the strawbs and straw are still there, as is the wide, Fife sky (and it's an oft-quoted pseudo-statistic that Fife gets less annual rainfall than Crete, did you know, but then of course presumably in compensation it must really piss down in Crete all through the winter) but now the sky and the straws have been separated from one another, so that's a shot-in-the-foot for the notion of pick-your-own being an opportunity to get out in the open air really. Unfortunately at Carinie they have set up ginormous sort of.....vast, white, high-roofed, covered (but partly open-sided, or else everyone would suffocate or run wild claustrophobic) poly-tunnels over the very, very extensive strawberry fields. Presumably these help to screen the fruit / fruit pickers from the hostile environment - but if the environment's so hostile, you begin to wonder why on earth they bother growing soft fruit in Fife / opening up a pick-your-own enterprise there in the first place?

The overall effect of the high polytunnels which I saw for the first time when I visited earlier this month (August 09) is pretty disconcerting. Cairnie specializes in pick-your-own strawberries, raspberries and other soft fruit but the strawberry fields in particular seem to be their speciality, and these are so large and extensive that they have to run a minibus service to trundle visitors (as well as, presumably, teams of professional fruit-pickers) to and from the furthest of them. Imagine these enormous strawberry-growing areas all being under white plastic cover - the polytunnels rolling up and down with the Fife landscape, so large in the undulating topgraphy that you can't even see to the ends of them - and that the overall effect is that you're visitng some sort of set from the 'X-files' TV series; one of the 'sinister agricultural practice' episodes where they're testing GM-modified bees and / or alien crops. I suppose in commercial terms it's a success, but this part of the Cairnie enterprise is not much fun to visit.

And so to the childrens' play-park. It was absolutely, bleedin' mobbed the day we went (a Thursday at the end of the school holidays); Cairnie, for all the relatively huge, in soft-fruit terms, size of its crop area, is situated down a tiny B-road in darkest, rural Fife, so it was surprising to see the volume of vehicular traffic that had been attracted to the site. There must've been a total of 200+ cars in the main and overflow carparks the day we went, and all of these containing families with one or more kids, all of whom were running wild in the play-park. Though the play area was very busy it did seem justabout large enough to absorb this volume of visitors. There are trampolines, swings, a bouncy pillow, pedal tractors, pay-to-ride electric cars and tractors, straw-bales to climb on and under, a maize-maze, pay-to-go-on tractor-trailer rides, etc.

In 'high season' it costs £4.75 per child and £4.25 per adult to access the play area (and yes, I have got those costs round the right way; it is indeed more expensive for children). It's free play-park access for under-three-year-olds (and pensioners!) and costs slightly less for paying customers earlier in the year. Access to the pick-your-own fields, the farm shop (which sells ready-picked soft fruit, toys and souviners, and decorative tat for your house but that's about it), the picnic tables and the on-site cafe are free. The play-area is fenced off; entry to it is by hand-stamp and everyone's hand-stamp is checked by a warden / marshall at the entry booth as you go into the play area, so in some respects at Cairnie they seem to be quite security conscious.

I did however have some very grave and I think realistic concerns about child safety at Cairnie, which I've written about to the people who run the site and sent via email. (I asked for at least receipt of my message to be acknowledged, but have received no reply as yet and have largely given up expecting one.) These concerns relate not to the attractions on the site itself, but specifically to the way the children in and beyond the play area are monitored by Cairnie staff.

This is not by any means a safe site to 'let your children off the leash' to run wild in the play area - unlike what it might at first appear to be, and I strongly would advise parents visiting with children of ANY age to accompany them wherever possible. Cairnie is in an agricultural area for starters; from the bottom of the Cairnie fields there is free access to other arable areas in the surrounding countryside. Heavy farm machinery, such as are used in late summer on working farms during the harvest, and straying children certainly don't mix; there is also an unfenced unexpectedly busy road next to the car-park; kids can get in and out of the site round the side of the 'official' entry points; the list of minor problems goes on and on, and this is not even touching on what I would consider to be the most obvious problem with the site.

Keep a close eye on your kids while visiting, and it should be all right, would be my main bit of advice to any potential visitors. And this does, after all, seem to be the basic attitude of the Cairnie Fruit Farm's management in their approach to health and safety at their new attraction.

Incidentally the visitor loos - or at least the ones I saw - at this attraction seem to consist of portakabins, which isn't really sufficient. If you drive into Cupar, the nearest town to Cairnie, which is about 2 miles away, there is a big (at the time of writing free) public carpark on the left as you reach the first main junction in town. Park in there and use the beautifully-maintained loos in the information office in the car park, for which they'll charge you 30p but it's worth every penny, instead.

Summary: Keep an eye on your kids at all times when visiting, I can't stress that strongly enough