Pack a wet-weather kit before you leave home

Every lodge holiday comes with a gamble on the British weather, and even the best-planned week in the Lakes, the Peak District or a quiet corner of Wales can serve up three grey days in a row. The families who cope best are not the ones who get lucky with the forecast; they are the ones who arrive with a plastic box in the boot already stuffed with things to do. Think of it as insurance: you may never open it, but if the rain settles in for the afternoon, you will be very glad it is there.

Keep everything in one lidded crate so it travels easily between the car, the lodge and the cabin floor. A few small, cheap additions make a real difference.

• A pack of playing cards, dominoes, draughts and a couple of dice in a zip bag
• Two or three board games, chosen for different ages rather than all for the eldest
• A stack of A4 paper, coloured pencils, glue sticks and blunt-nosed scissors
• Modelling dough or air-drying clay, plus a wipe-clean tablecloth
• A baking kit: weighed dry ingredients in labelled jars or bags, and a printed recipe
• Torches, a small Bluetooth speaker and a box of headbands for charades

Board games, cards and the cabin championship

The trick with board games is to bring fewer than you think and to make them last longer. Rather than tipping out four boxes at once, run a cabin championship across the whole week: a scoreboard on the fridge, a point for every game won, a small prize on the final evening. A simple game suddenly matters far more when there is a tally attached to it.

Choose games that suit the youngest player without boring the oldest. Draughts, dominoes, Snakes and Ladders and a good deck of cards cover most ages from five upwards, and card games such as rummy or a simple matching game can be taught in ten minutes. For older children, add a quiz book and a pad of paper for word games, and let them run the scoring themselves. If the lodge has a wood-burning stove or an open fire, an evening of games by lamplight is often the memory children carry home, not the sunshine you were hoping for.

Craft supplies that pack flat and clean up easily

Craft is the great saviour of a wet morning, but only if you choose projects that do not need a workshop. Stick to things that fit on a table and tidy away in a minute. Air-drying clay is perfect: children can make beads, small animals or leaf-shaped decorations, and the pieces will be dry enough to paint by the end of the week. Paper folding, friendship bracelets from embroidery thread, and collages made from old magazines and a glue stick all work beautifully.

Set one ground rule before you start: everything stays on the wipe-clean cloth. Give each child their own shallow tray or shoebox lid to work in, which keeps beads and scraps contained and makes tidying a two-minute job rather than a twenty-minute one. If you are staying somewhere with a strict no-mess policy, save the messy clay for the last day and stick to drawing, sticker books and colouring for the rest of the week.

Baking kits and kitchen-table science

A cabin kitchen is the ideal place for a rainy-day bake, partly because it warms the whole space up. Weigh out your dry ingredients at home into labelled jars or freezer bags, tie on the recipe, and you have a baking kit that needs nothing but butter, an egg and a bowl. Scones, flapjacks, shortbread and simple fairy cakes all use few ingredients and give children something to do with their hands.

If baking feels like too much washing up, try kitchen-table science instead. A tray of bicarbonate of soda and vinegar, a jar of water with food colouring and a few drops of oil, or a simple volcano built from dough will hold attention for an hour. Cover the table, keep a roll of kitchen paper nearby, and let them get on with it.

Cosy corners, dens and quiet time

Wet afternoons work best when they alternate between noisy and quiet. Build a den first: a clothes horse, a couple of blankets and a torch make a cave that will absorb children for a surprising length of time. Then bring the energy down with audiobooks, a family film, or a chapter book read aloud while everyone is sprawled on the sofa. A small speaker and a downloaded playlist or story means you are not relying on patchy rural Wi-Fi.

Keep a torch by each bed, too. Dark evenings in the countryside feel like an adventure rather than a limitation, and a bedtime story by torchlight is a lovely way to end a day that never quite got outside.

When the rain finally eases

Most wet days have a window in them. Keep wellies, waterproofs and a change of clothes by the door so that a break in the clouds can be seized in two minutes flat. A short, purposeful walk works better than a long one: a puddle-jumping circuit, a hunt for the biggest leaf, or a dash to the nearest village for a hot chocolate. Getting out, even briefly, resets everyone's mood and makes coming back to the games and the baking feel like a treat rather than a sentence.