If the usual autumn offering of blood-soaked Halloween spectres and noisy firework displays leaves you cold, there’s something in the woods in Bedgebury Pinetum that thrills in a clever new way. Helen Geraghty and kids love the Electric Forest.

Children always love to go for a walk in the woods in the dark with a torch and add to this the Electric Forest, a night-time light and sound extravaganza of scientific inventiveness and you are on to a memorable winner.

Now in its second year, the magnificently crackpot interactive 'installation’ can only have been dreamed up by pixies with GCSEs in physics.

Leaving the car park into the darkness, you plunge downwards towards the woods, groups of people trickling slowly through, to ensure you get the full effect of whichever jaw-dropping showpiece you run into first.

Many of them are sparked off by your very presence, so just by standing in a certain spot, or touching a certain lever, tapping a drum or brushing against a tree trunk you can light up the trees in a technicolour display or spark a musical crescendo of sound.

The effect is to discover, from darkness, the shape of these trees, and the sheer size of the forest becomes quite overwhelming.

This year’s layout is different from 2010, the Electric Forest at Bedgebury’s first year, but relies on the same great recipe which last year gave us musical pebble-throwing into the lake, bongo drums that lit up trees and a lantern-lit hidey-hole in a rhododendron clump.

The new route, we are told, snakes through coppices, close growing pines and beautiful mature trees and includes a 'mirror ball’ boardwalk through a musical ballroom of sweet chestnut coppices.

There’s the negative forest, where Scots Pines buzz with a magical glow and Bedgebury’s giant rope swing is itself the trigger for a cascade of starry illuminations; the more you swing the busier the display gets.

You can paint your own spooky picture on an interactive glow wall – a surface you can draw on with a torch. There will also be some local story tellers and Halloween games.

A huge success with my children last year was toasting marshmallows over a brazier on long sticks, which is on offer again this year. Less stickily, there will be roast chestnuts too for 2011.

You might like to know that because Culture Creative, who run these events at a number of venues, take care not to cast light up into the sky you can still see the stars. The sounds are localised, rather than long range and deafening, so impact on wildlife is small.

But what I love about the clever Electric Forest is that it attracts people to go for a walk in these beautiful woods who probably wouldn’t ever do it otherwise. Unlike some Halloween events it doesn’t rely on violent imagery to thrill small children. And unlike bonfire night it doesn’t terrify wildlife and pets and leave the ground littered with rubbish.

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The Electric Forest runs from Saturday, October 22 to Sunday, October 30 from 6pm to 9pm. For details visitwww.theelectricforest.co.uk. This is a robust outdoor event, largely in darkness. You are advised to wear warm clothes and sensible footwear. And don’t forget a torch.