Eating, entertainment, spa luxury, fitness, pampering – and little animals – all this and more is on your doorstep when you buy a holiday home here

Val Chapman crams a tour of vast Ribby Hall Village into three hours and discovers a world of activity – and indulgence

Ribby Hall Village is an extraordinary place. Everything from a sumptuously luxurious spa hotel to an interactive animal experience complex called Wild Discovery is here, in more than 100 acres of family-focused holiday village, surrounded by countryside.

This veritable village has a vast array of eating venues, year-round entertainment and activities, plus specific events, at Easter, Halloween and Christmas, for example.

There's a self-contained holiday atmosphere here; once here, you'd never want to leave. Whatever your interests, there's reason to regularly return and something here for you to enjoy. I spent just three hours discovering what holiday home owners have on their doorstep, cramming in snapshot experiences of all this place has to offer. Here’s what I found at this exclusive mini resort…

Outdoor activities

There’s a nine-hole golf course, plus mini-golf and a boating lake, and two carp-stocked fishing lakes.

Fitness

The Health Club has a fitness studio; Pilates, yoga and spinning classes are among the activities. There are badminton courts and table tennis. And the Multi-Level Gym is multi-level in both structure (three levels) and versatility; whatever level of fitness or goals you have, there is something for you here.

Running machines, rowing machines, weight equipment. One device, called the Omnia, provides lots of different exercises on one machine.

And there’s a free crèche for parents with children aged six months to six years.

Animals and more

Wild Discovery is a new venture at Ribby; it opened in August 2016. It's interactive (feeding sessions and seminars) – and educational; that’s not just about children. The rare species whose specially-created natural environments are here include some that I’d never seen before.

Among them are aquatic frogs that mimic stones, minute White Tree Frogs that are so pure bright lime green that they look as if they’re plastic toys, and genets, a pointed-faced feline species that look endearingly as much like ringed lemurs as they do cats. I could have spent two hours and more in this area alone.

There are donkeys, emus and alpacas to meet, rare breed sheep to observe, cute marmosets, birds of prey to watch (and flying displays will become a regular feature in the coming months).

Then a chattering sound draws me to the meerkat enclosure, and half a dozen of them are rolling over each other in play. They stop when they realise that a visitor is peering over the low barrier to them; their exquisitely cute faces suddenly point upwards in anticipation of food, but they have to wait until 3.30 this day; that's the time children (of all ages) get to feed meerkats. Animals experiences make memories, even for Editors!

Holiday home owners can buy an individual annual entrance pass for Wild Discovery; £30 for adults and £25 for children; you can visit as many times as you like for a year.

Eating

Papa John’s pizzas, coffee places including Starbucks, the Bar and Grill (recently refurbished with a new look), The Restaurant, the Orangery. (Holiday home owners get 10% discount in the restaurants and Harrisons Bar, by way of a Privilege Card which enables you to earn points as you spend.) There's an excellent choice of eating styles here, and a Spar supermarket to buy food to cook in your holiday home.

There’s also the new Village Garden to explore, where they grow some of the ingredients for The Restaurant; you can wander into the garden; relax or perhaps eat a sandwich for lunch.

Swimming

There are two pools – one for serious swimming, the other for families, with chutes and slides and other fun features. Ribby Hall's regular programme of reinvestment involves the family pool next; by March it will be revamped, with bigger slides complete with interactivity; activating a light will trigger a slide-speed score which then goes on Facebook.., fantastic fun.

The Spa Hotel

Down the long, straight drive from the imposing fountain-waterfall at the village entrance is Ribby’s glittering jewel, an architecturally grand, sophisticated spa-theme hotel where the level of luxury is an experience. A series of lounge-bar cosy enclaves leads off from the entrance, equipped with sumptuous big leather sofas. The Orangery restaurant is here; where they hold gourmet evenings and tasting menus.

It’s the indulgent spa element of this awesomely lavish place that’s the main attraction, though. You can take an Aqua Thermal Journey, seven water and temperature experiences designed to relax and revive you. Steam rooms, sauna (and then a herbal sauna), an outdoor rustic sauna, an ice fountain(!) then the jet-massaging hydrotherapy pool and finally relax in the outdoor hot tub. And then? More relaxation in the new Zen garden.

Pampering opportunities extend to Elemis treatments, Ishga facials and Neom body treatments, Jessica nail treatments – all famously luxuriant product names to tempt you to book an indulgent session on a regular basis. All this represents another reason to buy a holiday home here. The more I explored the vast offering at Ribby Hall Village the more compelling it became.

Holiday home owners get 10% reduction here in the Spa hotel, too, and 15% off pampering and grooming products.

Easter Eggstravaganza

(31 March – 20 April). Discover giant Easter eggs in the woodlands, crack them open to solve clues, bottle feed lambs, meet Easter chicks and more.

The small print

The season is 10 ½ months long here; dogs are welcome; sub-letting isn’t allowed. Your contract of stay extends to 20 years with a static caravan here, and 50 years with a lodge. And the annual pitch fee? £5875 for a static caravan, rising to £6975 for an “executive" lodge.

Try before you buy

Spending a week or a shorter break at Ribby Hall Village is a splendid way to experience all that the village has to offer. Depending on the time of the year, a static caravan here would cost from just £164 for a week. After March this year, you can quite literally test the water – they open a new pool complex by then.

Your holiday home choice

From pre-owned static caravans at around £25,000 to top luxury lodges over £100,000, there's a full selection here.

Around £50,000 buys you into new holiday home ranges here. We looked at a new Pemberton Abingdon, £54,000, with an unusual layout: folding wooden doors divide the lounge from the dining kitchen; two rooms is an ideal plan for a family, we decided; this one has three bedrooms. You can convert twin beds to doubles in two of the rooms, or one bed fold under the other to make just a single room. Brilliantly versatile!

Carnaby, ABI, Willerby, Swift, Victory, Omar, Arcab, Cambrian and Reiver and Prestige homes are available at Ribby. Pre-owned lodges start at around £75,000 and rise to £175,000 and upwards for new lodges.

In some areas of the park you can have gas piped to your home; in other sectors, it's gas in cylinders (housed out of sight). Pitches are large, with good parking space. Some sit beside the fishing lakes; others back onto woodland. Some come with TVs in all bedrooms.

Always keen to seek out the very best, something to aspire to, we discovered a Prestige Matrix, a new model that’s truly inspirational. If you dream of the holiday home concept, take a look at this one.

Its 45 feet long an 20 feet wide, has three bedrooms and stunning red gloss kitchen units. Everything about this home is ultra-modern – they divided the kitchen from the lounge by a central island wall with a soft-glow log fireplace on the sitting room side and the oven plus pull-out-shelf kitchen cabinets on the other.

Equipment includes a dishwasher and wine cooler!

Although these are all holiday homes, like many at Ribby, this one is a full residential specification regarding insulation.

A double bedroom, a twin room, a bathroom with roll-top bath, a corridor study leading to the master bedroom master with en-suite shower room and a TV with handset control to rise it from within a cabinet at the foot of the bed… And the price? £187,000.