Deep Sea World in North Queensferry under the iconic Forth Railway Bridge bills itself as Scotland's national aquarium and a fun filled venue for a family day out. The aquarium is easy to reach by car with ample free parking, a nearby railway station and bus service from Dunfermline. The first thing you will have to do when you arrive, depending on the time of year, is queue up for tickets. There are markers at various points along the queue telling you how long until you will reach the door, expect to wait up to an hour at peak times. You queue along the quarry which is supposed to hold seals but was empty the last time I visited. Spending ages in a queue is not the best way to start a visit anywhere and this is one of the many reasons that we do not visit anymore.

Once you get inside the first area you come to is a main hall containing many tanks of different types of sealife. This is also the location of a pool full of starfish, anemones and flatfish with regular talks and handling sessions. The talks are really interesting with a diver in the pool telling the visitor about the various inhabitants of the tank and answering questions from the audience.

There is a wide variety of marine life on display here. My favourite are the octopus which curl their legs around the objects in their tank and seem to merge with their surroundings. The seahorses are very different from how I imagined them to be swaying around their tanks. The kids will love the clownfish introduced after Finding Nemo became a big hit, just make sure that they don't try and stick their fingers into the piranha tanks!

The underwater tunnel is 112 metres long and holds over a million gallons of water enclosed safely under 6 inch thick glass panels making it one of the largest underwater tunnels in the world. The underwater aquarium is stocked with British fish like flatfish and mackerel and also houses the sharks which are from Mexico. You are carried along a walkway by a conveyor belt giving the impression of drifting along the seafloor and you are free to step off the belt at any time to take a closer look at anything which has caught your attention. The underwater area is divided into different habitats containing a diverse range of fish representing the different types of marine habitats found in Britain, for example huge eels live in an area with lots of rocks and caves for them to hide.

The tunnel is home to the sand tiger sharks which are obviously well fed as they don't feel the need to snack on their tank mates. There are regular shark feeding sessions where you can watch the divers in the tanks toss pieces of fish to these large creatures. There are talks accompanying these feeding sessions and the divers do demonstrations for the kids, for example blowing bubbles and making hand signals and waving at people. This is definitely the highlight of the visit.

The Amazing Amphibian exhibition is in a separate room and houses snakes, a small crocodile and tanks of frogs. The colourful little frogs are really interesting to watch with their bright colours and sticky pads on their feet letting them climb up the glass and it is hard to believe how poisonous they are.

The other main attraction is the Amazon Rainforest section which has nice exhibits with audio visual displays and unusual fish like cat fish. There are also electric eels with hands on exhibits all about electricity which are nice to see.

Once you have wandered around Deep Sea World you may well feel peckish and want to head to the café for a meal or snack. The café has huge windows with stunning views across the river Forth but this is about all it has going for it. The cafeteria style self service café has a range of sandwiches and hot meals and drinks. The food is unimaginative and poor quality with options like a kids chicken nugget meal which are massively overpriced and the café itself is far too busy and cluttered.

You need to pass the gift shop on the way out of the centre and here they have a range of plastic toys on display within easy reach of your kids so that they can pester you to buy them.

Deep Sea World is a major tourist attraction and while it has interesting exhibits it is not somewhere that I particularly recommend for a visit. It only takes an hour at most to go around the aquarium and see all of the fish, even going round the exhibits for a second time to squeeze some more value out of the day will only add another half an hour or so onto your visit. The ticket prices are extortionate for what is on offer, an adult ticket costs a whopping £11.75 and a child's ticket £8.00 so it works out as an expensive attraction to visit and not at all good value for a couple of hours entertainment. For around the same price you can visit either Edinburgh Zoo or Blair Drummond Safari Park and have a full day entertainment instead of just a couple of hours.

Deep Sea World also gets extremely busy during peak times with huge queues to get into the attraction and once you are inside it is very noisy and you will have to fight your way through the crowds to see all of the exhibits. I really think that it is one of the most over hyped attractions within Scotland and you get the feeling that they are only interested in extracting as much cash from the visitor as possible whether they enjoy themselves or not. Kids do enjoy Deep Sea World and on the plus side it is somewhere that you can visit on a cold and wet day but it is still very low down on my list of places to visit in the area.