A walk around Shipley Country Park.

About a 10 minute walk from my house is Shipley Country Park, a 700 acres park which contains a large pond, woodlands and large open medows and fields. The estate dates back to Norman times and is mentioned in the Doomsday Book and was for a time around the 14th century was a sporting and hunting estate. The Miller Mundy family later owned the estates and were owners of the local coal mines on the site.
In the 1960's the last of the deep mines closed ending a 250 year history of deep coal mining there and left the pollution to the landscape in spolheaps and old mine shafts. Over a 4 year period in the 70's open cast mining was carried out before work on the present park started that ended in 1976 when the parks were opened to the public after extensive landscaping, seeding fields and meadows and planting trees that make up the present woodlands.

On todays walk we headed away from the pond and fields and headed for the meadows which are full of wild flowers. partly this is because our dog isn't the best around other dogs so we head away from the more popular areas of the park.

Littered around the park are old water troughs like this one below.

Towards the top end of the park is an old gatehouse that you can see just peering from amungst the trees.

As we reached the trees the dog ran off chacing squirrels, you can just about make him out as he jumps up at a tree.

After I finally caught him we walked down to the old gatehouse that is used as a cafe today, while we didn't buy anything they always have waterbowls out for dogs to have a drink. Then it was time to start walking back down through the park and home.