I stayed at budget Center Parcs in Sherwood Forest - it was full of props from a classic movie

If you want to know if the schoolkids are on holiday right now, Center Parcs has a really useful tool on its website. If you would need to sell a kidney to book a short break then yes, they are on holiday.

If it's just about affordable, they're at school, which was great when my pair were smaller. Now it's not ideal as, much as I would like a few days at Center Parcs, I cannot justify the cost.

So we looked elsewhere for a few days during a recent break and after deciding that we just couldn't be bothered with Airbnb, which appears to be more expensive than ever, we opted for somewhere I'd never stayed before - a Hoseasons site in Sherwood Forest.

More specifically Sherwood Castle Holiday Forest, next to Rufford Abbey Country Park, off Rufford Lane. We'd stayed in Hoseasons places before, and found them a bit strange. Not bad, just a bit weird. I have terrifying memories of some kids entertainment being so scary my youngest son refused to sleep because of "the demon pig".

But, despite that, it was £250 for two nights of accommodation in the heart of Sherwood Forest. It was also pet friendly, so we decided to take our puppy away for his first holiday.

So, dog crate in hand, we made the short trip north and immediately realised why it had decent reviews. The location, obviously, is stunning. And with Rufford Lane closed, it wasn't jam-packed with Youtubers trying to film people trashing their Tesla in Rufford Ford.

The site, which isn't huge, is based around a huge wooden castle which contains several props from Robin Hood Prince of Thieves including a trebuchet, wagon and the belfry, which is in the reception itself.

Sadly Kevin Costner is not on site teaching archery, but the props are all accompanied by signs explaining their importance, which I got far too excited about. The fact that I knew nothing about this until I stumbled upon it is classic Hoseasons, but it made the evening dog walk more interesting. I doubt anyone else had to stop their dog from peeing on a prop from a Hollywood blockbuster during their half-term break.

Costner aside, the facilities on the site are a touch basic. There's no bar (it's a small site) but there is an indoor playground, badminton court, basketball court and croquet area, for those who just have to keep their croquet skills up away from the lawn.

There's a small pool too, but it also looked a bit like a prop from Prince of Thieves. The fact that my kids didn't fancy it, and they'll swim in a deep puddle given the chance, shows that it was not particularly enticing.

We didn't come for that though, Sherwood Forest has more than enough to keep a youngish family busy, and the main thing for us was the accommodation, which was absolutely fine. We stayed in a log cabin with two bedrooms, a well-appointed kitchen, log burner and a working TV.

We ran out of hot water pretty quickly which required a trip to reception, but once we'd essentially been told to take much shorter showers, we adapted our routine to cope. It wasn't a big deal, although a note about how to operate the hot water, and how little the tank holds, might be worth adding to the book of information in the kitchen.

A note of warning, some of the lodges are big and have hot tubs and bars, so on our second night a stag or hen do arrived and were banging out Abba on the karaoke until 11pm. It wasn't too noisy though, and compared to some of the sites we've stayed in in Skeg Vegas it was positively peaceful.

Would we return? Yeah, possibly. It was cheap and in a great spot and the accommodation was a solid 7/10. It's obviously not Center Parcs even though it looks like it at first glance, but I only saw one Dry Robe during the two day break, so it's not all bad.