I’ve wanted to see a model village for a long time, and although I’m not sure there’s anything special about this one, it coincided with my trip to Great Yarmouth. When I told people that I was visiting a model village for the letter M, they assumed that was because M stands for Model. I went one step further and found a model village that begins with M as well. Double win!

I liked Merrivale Model Village, because they had signs saying: “Take as many pictures as you want, but please stick to the paths.” That sounds like a deal I can get on board with. I suppose these places are more designed for little people because to take my pictures I found myself kneeling down quite a lot.

The models weren’t perfect. I was a bit surprised because if the whole point of your village is that there are little scale models of human beings, I would have thought a bit more effort could go into making them look like human beings rather than… well… something a kid has made out of plasticine. Some of them were better than others though.

There were a couple of tracks winding around the models, with trains speeding along. One of them was a Thomas train which broke the magic a little as well. However, all that aside, it was fun to meander through a winding path, and it was easy to concentrate on each bit in front of you, with each corner bringing a new surprise. It wasn’t until the end that I looked up and realised that actually, there was a lot of stuff squeezed into a relatively small space.

Overall, I enjoyed it very much. A good way to pass an hour. It’s not a place to spend a lengthy amount of time, but I walked slowly through, I took quite a lot of pictures, and I left feeling happy I’d got my money’s worth. Afterwards, I walked around Great Yarmouth for a bit, which was very pretty and an interesting change from some of the south coast places I have been to. It reminded me very much of a holiday I took with my parents to Scarborough where I really discovered the power of candy floss.

I refrained from having candy floss this time.