Elvaston Castle Country Park

It has been a beautiful day without a single cloud. I parked up in Breaston and followed the national cycle route for about 3 miles, to the country park. The cycle route follows the path of a disused canal. Most of the canal has disappeared, but there are plans to reopen a 12.5 mile stretch of disused canal, including the stretch that I walked along today, in order to join up the Nottingham and Derby canal systems.

There are extensive gounds surrounding the Castle, a mixture of woodland and formal gardens:-

The "castle" is a stately home built in the early 1800's. It is owned by the local council (Derbyshire County Council) now. Until last year, they used the building as a museum, but it has now closed and doesn't look likely to re-open anytime soon, as the building needs a lot of repair works, which the Council cannot afford.

I bumped into an ex colleague in the Castle grounds. We chewed the fat for a bit, yakking about this and that, and she told me that she had heard that the Council had considered closing the grounds, recently, due to the cost of maintaining them.


I did a circuit of the grounds, which have a lake and topiary garden:-
I was out for just over 5 hours so estimate that I walked about 10 miles.