Chatelherault Country Park Reviews Summary

Scenery and Walks

Pros:

• "Love this place for long family dog walks especially early in the morning."
• "This place has various walks available with hours of forest, rivers and beautiful scenic views."
• "Paths that are paved and gravel for buggies and wheelchairs."
• "Huge car park so no issues. Paths well maintained and easy accessible for most people."
• "Various lovely walks of varying length through trees or along the river to suit your needs."
• "Different views every time you go esp if stray from the beaten track you can put the world on mute for a while."
• "Great walk, did the circular yesterday with my two dogs. Took about 2 hours, bit steep either side of green bridge so decent footwear advised."
• "Chatelherault Country Park provides a gorgeous circular walk either side of the valley, shaded almost completely by the full green canopy above."

Cons:

• "It can be quite muddy and it's dirt paths in places so definitely need to have correct walking shoes on."
• "Be warned, one of the bridges is gone and there was no sign to alert us which resulted in a further 90 minute walk to the next bridge and round."
• "Maybe not so great as a cycle route as there's loads of stairs."
• "Didn't visit the house but walked some of the trails, great place but a few things let it down, paths closed due to damaged bridges."
• "The park is nice, but the ladies at the cafe are racist. They got angry at me asking for the coffee because they could hear a non-Scottish accent."
• "It's a wonderful park for a walk with the family, friends or even the dogs. You can cross country run, walk and cycle along the parks long forest paths. I understand the longest route to be around the 7km mark but with paths running to Hamilton and Larkhall that can extend your trail by many miles if you wanted."
• "We have been going to the park for years and used to love the walks through the trees! Lately, it seems to have lost its nice feeling now feels like someone has decided to wreck the whole place."
• "Pretty disappointing to be honest. First time here and only had a short time so decided to do the route via the white bridge. When I got there (roughly the halfway point of the walk) it had clearly been closed for a long time so why were there no signs warning people."

Cafe and Facilities

Pros:

• "Cafe which has a really good selection of sandwiches, treats and drinks at the visitor centre with public bathrooms."
• "The visitor centre is one of the better centres I've been too. Some gallery stuff, loads of info about the place and the shop is decently priced and sells flavoured gin (irn bru)."
• "There is plenty of wildlife to see as well. The park includes a visitor centre with an onsite cafe, toilets, shop and small museum."
• "Nice cafe and good gift shop (it is expensive, as are all gift shops). The toilets were okay but no way to dry your hands 😧."

Cons:

• "The Oaks cafe is very overpriced and the staff aren't friendly. Well they weren't to me."
• "The place is beautiful. We didn't really get chance to go too far round the walks as it was just too cold today. Only thing was that the food in the cafe isn't great."
• "There was plastic in my soup, which is fine, it happens. Took it back and the manager said they don't use anything like that and that the soup was brought in bags."
• "Visited the cafe, bought teas and 2 cakes for £8.00. The cakes were stale and hard and no cream served with cakes... very dry."
• "kids play park is really dangerous as there is sand on the supposed to be safety ground covering. This makes it very slippy my granddaughters kept falling over and I didn't feel safe walking on it either."
• "Tea room is rather expensive given the quality of the sandwiches I had cheese and pickle with a noticeable lack of cheese Americano Coffee really not to my taste extremely bitter Making of the coffee takes too long not a fault of the staff just the equipment possible that a serve yourself coffee machine would be beneficial to speed up the process as quite large queues can accumulate waiting for coffee."