A family walk app for getting British kids outside

Most family walks in the UK end the same way. Someone's tired, someone's bored, one welly's half off. Peekabout gives the kids a reason to keep walking, on the walk you're already on.

Peekabout is a small paid app, £3.99 one-off, that turns any British walk into a nature scavenger hunt. Pick your biome and the weather, tell it your hunters' ages, and a fresh list of real things to spot appears in a few seconds. No login, no ads, no tracking, no subscription. The parent holds the phone and reads the clues aloud. The kids explore the real world.

A parent in a waxed cotton jacket and woolly hat walking along a muddy path beside a drystone wall in the Peak District on a soft overcast November day, with two children a few steps ahead in waterproofs and wellies. One child is lifting a stick, the other is crouched by the wall examining something small. Wet grass, wet bark, diffuse grey sky.

Peekabout is not a walking route app

There are several very good UK walking route apps and they are doing a different job. Go Jauntly knows the best local routes. AllTrails rates the gradient. OS Maps shows you where the footpath actually goes. Komoot plans the longer ones. Peekabout is not competing with any of them. It is about what your kids do on the walk once you have picked it, not about picking the walk.

You can use both happily. Plan the loop in OS Maps or Go Jauntly, open Peekabout in the car park before you set off, and start walking. One app gets you to the right footpath. The other gets the kids to stop complaining about the footpath.

Where it works in the UK

Peekabout does not need GPS coordinates or a pre-walked route. It builds a hunt around what the biome and weather actually look like at this time of year. Pick Woodland in a National Trust oakwood and you get acorns, moss, a robin's song, a great spotted woodpecker drumming somewhere out of sight. Pick Moor on a Yorkshire Dales ridge and you get heather, drystone walls, bracken, the far bleat of a Swaledale. Pick Park on Hampstead Heath and you get the things a London common actually has, grey squirrels, conkers under the horse chestnuts, a heron on the pond.

RSPB reserves and Woodland Trust woods are especially strong because the wildlife is already densely gathered. Forestry England trails work well for woodland walks of almost any length. Canal towpaths are surprisingly good for a half-hour Urban hunt (moorhens, coots, narrowboat flowers, a heron being patient). And any local park with a bench, a tree, and a patch of grass is enough for a twenty-minute loop with a tired four-year-old.

Works with the walks British kids already know

If your family has the National Trust's "Fifty Things to Do Before You're 11¾" booklet in a kitchen drawer, Peekabout is the companion to it. The booklet says "roll down a hill" and "climb a tree". Peekabout writes the kids a fresh list of ten real things to find today, calibrated to the weather and biome in a way no printed booklet can be.

Same for the RSPB's Wild Challenge, the Woodland Trust's Nature Detectives activities, Forestry England's Forest Families programme, and the small army of free printable scavenger hunts that get passed around parent WhatsApps every half term. Peekabout does not replace any of these. It fits alongside them. It happens to be always there, on the phone you were going to bring anyway, in the ten seconds between putting boots on and walking out the door.

Questions families ask about family walks

Does Peekabout work on a National Trust walk?

Yes. National Trust properties usually pair parkland, woodland, and sometimes meadow or lakeside into a single visit, and Peekabout handles each biome separately. Start a hunt when you arrive for the woods, then generate a second one round the formal gardens if the kids still have energy. The tearoom at the end is a Peekabout-respected tradition.

It pairs naturally with the National Trust's "Fifty Things to Do Before You're 11¾" booklet, which tends to live in a lot of family kitchen drawers already.

Does it work on RSPB reserves?

Yes, and reserves are among the best walks to hunt on because the wildlife density is already high. Set the biome to match the reserve: Woodland for Ynys-hir, Moor for Geltsdale, Shore for South Stack, Wetland for Minsmere or Ham Wall. Type the reserve name into the free-text notes field at setup and Peekabout will lean into what the RSPB has already gathered there.

Good for families who already do the Big Garden Birdwatch and want something similar for an afternoon out.

Does Peekabout need phone signal on a moor?

No, not while you're walking. Generate the hunt before you head up, ideally in the car park where you usually have signal. Once generated, the whole hunt runs on your phone with no connection at all: hints, facts, and the tracking all offline. Useful for Kinder Scout, upper Dartmoor, the Yorkshire Dales tops, the inland Peak District, and the parts of Pembrokeshire and Snowdonia where mobile coverage is still patchy.

Peekabout also ships with a built-in library of over 300 items, so if you forget to generate in advance, you can start a hunt from the library with no signal at all.

Is Peekabout any good in the rain?

Yes, and set the weather to Rainy at setup so the hunt adapts to what's actually there. Rain changes what's on a walk. Worms come up, puddles form, slugs and snails turn up, cobwebs get beaded with droplets, wet bark goes almost black and wet moss goes almost luminous.

A British family walk app that pretended the weather was always dry would be a daft thing. Boots, waterproofs, a rainy-day scavenger hunt. That's the setup for most of November and half of April, and honestly it's when the good walks happen.

More answers on the full help page, or the top fifteen on the homepage FAQ.

Peekabout is out on the App Store and Google Play, £3.99 once. Have a look around with a free sample hunt first if you'd like.

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