Knights, Lances, and a Lot of Screaming: A Family Day Out at Leeds Castle

There are days out, and then there are days out. Packed lunches in a car park. A slightly disappointing soft play. A National Trust garden where the most exciting thing that happens is a peacock. And then there are the days where your children watch armoured knights on horseback thunder toward each other with enormous wooden lances while you grip your lukewarm coffee and genuinely forget for a moment what century it is.

We went to Leeds Castle. We watched the jousting. It was, frankly, brilliant.

A Castle Surrounded by a Moat, Because of Course

Let's start with the setting, because Leeds Castle deserves that. Often described as the "loveliest castle in the world," it sits on an island, surrounded by a moat, with 500 acres of parkland and gardens stretching out around it. It's in Kent and also very easy to get to, which the family appreciated far more than they appreciated the 12th century architecture.

We arrived to blue skies and the distant sound of what I initially thought was a very determined woodpecker. It was not a woodpecker. It was a knight doing warm-up lance drills. We were off to a good start.

The Queen's Joust: England vs France vs Norway

This year's tournament features a tri-nation competition, with English, Norwegian, and French teams battling it out for the Leeds Castle International Cup, and the queen's favour. International jousting diplomacy. Who knew it was a thing? We do now, and we are fully invested.

Jousting performances run twice daily and we went to both, because once was clearly not going to be enough. The first show, the kids stood with their mouths open for approximately forty minutes. The second show, they had developed opinions about which knight deserved to win and were making their feelings known at volume.

Victory, we learned, isn't guaranteed by skill alone, if the queen deems a knight unworthy, she may simply choose another. This caused genuine outrage among our junior contingent, who felt this was deeply unfair to one particular Norwegian competitor they had decided was their champion. Medieval politics: still controversial.

The jousting itself is spectacular. The sound of lances connecting, that deep, resonant crack is something you feel in your chest as much as you hear it. The horses are enormous, the armour is gleaming, and the whole spectacle manages to feel genuinely dramatic without ever being daft. It is, in short, exactly what you want.

The Practicalities

The good news: the jousting is included in the standard castle admission price, so you're not paying extra on top of your entry fee for the main event. Parking is also included, which feels almost unbelievably civilised.

The whole day was one of those rare ones where everyone piled back into the car genuinely tired and genuinely happy, and the journey home was filled with debate about whether England deserved the cup, whether the queen made the right call, and whether we could get a lance for the back garden.

The answer to that last one is no. But we did go home having had one of the best family days out in recent memory. Leeds Castle and the Queen's Joust highly, highly recommended. Just maybe leave the back garden lance ambitions at the gate.