4.2 miles from us · CH62 4TQ
Port Sunlight River Park
Dock Road North, Bromborough
Twenty-eight hectares of old landfill turned over to grassland and surfaced paths, with a short climb to a view over the Mersey to the Liverpool waterfront.
This was a Biffa landfill until it closed in 2006. It opened as a park in 2014, and the scale of the change is the thing people mention first: twenty-eight hectares, about sixty-nine acres, of grass and scrub where the tipping used to be. It does not feel like a tip. It feels like a hill with unusually good paths on it.
Those paths are why we make the drive. There are about 4.2km of surfaced pathway, wide enough for a wheelchair, which in practice means wide enough for a dog on a long line and a person who would rather not come home muddy to the knee. When Dibbinsdale has been churned up by a wet week, this is where we go instead.
The climb to the top is short, and what you get at the end of it is the Mersey and the Liverpool waterfront laid out in front of you. Dogs like the top for their own reasons — it is open, it is usually windy, and the whole estuary arrives at once.
There is a Heritage Centre with toilets, and a cafe run by Autism Together which opens Monday to Friday, 10am to 3pm. The park is looked after in partnership with The Conservation Volunteers, and there are five bins for dog waste around the site.
Worth knowing
- Dogs are welcome off the lead if their recall is genuinely good, but they must be on the lead near the water and the conservation areas — that is to protect the wildlife and stop the embankments eroding.
- The car park is open 9am to 4:30pm and has ten spaces, two of them blue badge. So an early start does not work here, on a fine weekend it fills up, and in midwinter that 4:30 closing comes round not long after the light starts to go.
- The cafe is weekdays only, so there is no coffee at the weekend.
- CH62 4TQ, the postcode the park publishes, was retired by Royal Mail in June 2023, so some sat-navs and address lookups will not accept it. The road is Dock Road North in Bromborough and the entrance is at the end of it.
Details from The Land Trust — Port Sunlight River Park.
Other walks nearby
Twelve miles of old railway line that starts on our doorstep. Flat, sheltered, and you can do as much or as little of it as the dog has in them.
Mature woodland on the edge of the Mersey, with the estuary opening up through the trees. Closest proper woodland walk to the house.
Fifty-four hectares of ancient woodland in a river valley — the best of the local walks for a dog that wants to put its nose down and work.
Woodland and meadow either side of a brook, five minutes off junction 7 — the closest nature reserve to us on the Cheshire side of the boundary.
The old sea front at Parkgate, with the whole Dee estuary open in front of it. Flat walking, enormous skies, and more birds than most dogs know what to do with.
A shade under thirty-seven hectares of woodland, grass and water on the west side of the Wirral, with two surfaced waymarked trails straight from the car park and a cafe at the end of them. The longest trip of any walk we list.