Threave Castle

This place is great.
Just outside Castle Douglas.
You walk for about ten minutes from the car park to a little jetty.
There, you ring a bell for the "custodian", and a rather nice bloke brings a boat across from the island that the castle sits on and ferrys you back over.
Another nice bloke, who takes your money, then shows you a picture of a CROCODILE walking across the grass outside the castle after a flood.
The children are then terrified for the rest of the visit but cheer up when they spot a model of a fed up bloke sitting in the castle dungeon.

It's really rather lovely & in a bird/nature reserve place so you can look at lots of feathery &/or furred things, the names of which escape you, but which make you feel like a proper parent who's taking their children on proper educational trips.

For a minute.

Then you realise you can only correctly identify a swan and a heron and the rest of the flora/fauna ... nature stuff, is frankly, beyond you.

Exit swiftly. Find a tea room where I found that I could correctly ID tiffin, millionaires shortbread, lemon slice and malteser cake in an actual HEARTBEAT.