Foreign Perspectives

One thing that many country park type places seem to have in common is that they work to what seems to be quite a tight timetable.

Thus you’ll find on a sunny day if you’ve not found a parking space by 1pm or so then you can pretty much forget it until after 3pm when it quite suddenly becomes very easy to find a space. The reason is, of course, largely down to the lunchtime BBQ that’s very common in the summer and, by and large, it doesn’t matter a whole lot which day of the week it is although, on the whole, it’s a more mummy crowd during the week and a more equal mix at the weekend.

But what’s confusing is that it seems to happen in all the parks, or at least all those that we go to. We went to the relatively new for us Peaklands Park on Sunday and found the same thing. Arriving around 1pm the car park was relatively empty but seeing as it was nice we thought we’d nip out around 2pm to pick up a heap of BBQ stuff, finding the car park completely full and cars parked right out to the main road. Coming back little more than 40 minutes later there were quite a lot of spaces. When we’d to nip back out to the car a little after 3pm there were loads of spaces and by 5pm it was almost empty.

It wasn’t even that the park activities had closed down at 3pm as it’s basically a country park so the only activity is the delightful (and, for a change, good value) little train which goes on to just after 5pm.

Still, if you’d like a park relatively free of people, 3pm or later seems the time to go.