No half-term visit to Dublin would be complete without a visit to World of Soil

In Dublin for half-term, we’re spending a bright, cold afternoon at Airfield Gardens, another one of those urban farm-type deals to which my family seems lightly addicted. On entry, we’re given a checklist of sights to see, which adds a pleasingly competitive sheen to our first little blitz through the grounds, pointing at various things and crossing them out with the bookie’s pencils provided.

This is an ingenious method of galvanising kids’ attention to everything they see around them, charging us to spot, variously, a twig, an acorn, a donkey, and so on. It’s also, however, tailor-made to engage the worst competitively nitpicky impulses of their middle-aged dad. My wife has always said that, were she ever to murder me, it would probably be at a pub quiz, owing to my habit of getting “a bit grabby with the pen” – her term for when I, the fact-obsessed smartarse she married, become so tunnel-focused that I take over proceedings and ruin things for everyone else.

She shoots me a look of warning as I innocently list some very minor quibbles with the checklist itself. I merely point out that it depicts a robin in the field marked “bird”, and it’s unclear whether this robin is therefore merely an illustrative example of any bird, or the exact bird we must spot.

Muddling things further, hens have their own entry, even though I’ve always considered chickens to also be birds, and therefore covered by that earlier section. I may have saved particular scorn for the picture of a pine cone that they’ve placed alongside the text “acorn”, which must be either a typo or a trap, or some remnant of the entire list having been generated by AI. Alas, by this point my wife is sporting the type of glare one gives when trying to work out how far a very small pencil would have to be pushed into one’s husband’s throat to cause instant death.

Thankfully, a break comes in the form of a magnificently specific little exhibit we happen upon deeper inside the grounds. Named, excellently, Foodscape: World of Soil, it’s a series of geodesic huts kitted out with interactive exhibits relating to, well, soil. There are soil facts, soil puzzles, soil diagrams and soil touchscreens. There’s even soil in the walls and soil in the ceilings, since the entire complex is laid out as if it’s underground, with miner’s lights jutting out from trench-style wooden beams. Here and there, a stuffed fox pokes out above us, as if having burrowed down to us from the surface. It is, in a word, marvellous.

And we learn more about soil than we ever thought there was to learn about soil. Did you know that sand is a soil? I didn’t, mainly because I’ve always thought that sand is sand. But it turns out it’s a soil as well. I learn that every type of soil – not just sand – appears to be formed of four letters, like Silt and Peat and Dirt, each of which you can imagine being a conspicuously haute cuisine restaurant in a regional English town. You know the kind of thing: “Fishmonger Paul Torrance started CLAY after earning raves at SILT, bringing with him Jacques Tourrault, the wildman sommelier of Hampshire mainstay LOAM.”

My kids adore the cutesy animations featuring an anthropomorphic worm named Doug, who wears hi-vis and a hard hat, and explains the drainage properties of different types of dirt. There’s a game that allows you to match the carbon footprint to the food, and a quiz that tests you on what colour of soil has the most nutrients (the darker the better, apparently).

We finally emerge, blinking and fact-refreshed, to take in the rest of the park’s entertainments. There are hens and sheep and donkeys to gawk at – and, if you still have your checklist handy, to cross off. I even see a robin, which renders my first quibble moot. And I don’t even mind when my wife reminds the kids to cross each of the above off their own lists, bringing them level with me. They had their chance to spot it for themselves, of course, but – like I said – I don’t even mind.

Rain starts to pour, so we duck into a kids’ activity barn to keep dry. My daughter queues for 20 minutes to have her face painted. There are two separate lines for two different face painters. It’s clear the lady on the left is the better artist: her works show enterprise and flair, flowing with the contours of each child’s face to create a stirring image that incorporates their eyes and mouth.

The lady on the right, by contrast, is that other type of face painter, the kind who prefers to draw an image of something – a ghost, a unicorn – on the child’s face.

The lady on the left has the look of an artist who is merely slumming it in the play area of a family-friendly city farm, having just completed her master’s thesis in face painting at the Sorbonne. The lady on the right may have just come from eight months spent painting biohazard symbols on the side of an oil rig; she’s also much, much faster, so the choice is an easy one. My daughter asks for a butterfly, and is delighted with the playing card-sized daubing she gets on her cheek in response.

By now the rains have stopped, and we step out into the darkening evening to splash our way home. It is wet and turning slightly miserable, but we don’t mind. My kids have been run off their feet, we’ve learned of soil, and we’ve met some delightful animals.

And, joy of joys, I have only “puddle” to check off my list – and no one else seems to have noticed.

Photograph Getty Images