Peel Park map

Peel_Park_2018

Information

Peel Park & the Coppice.

There is a Permanent Orienteering Course at Peel Park.

The whole competition area (Park, Coppice, Plantation and open moor) is popular with runners, dog walkers, horse riders, mountain bikers and orienteers.
Peel Park comprises only a small area of easy parkland with adjacent areas of woodland and rough meadows, scrubland, becks, ponds and old mine workings to add interest.
The Coppice is the 1970's plantation on the hill scarp which offers open running. Above this is open moorland with an unusual pattern of ditches.
The Plantation was added to the competition area in 2012. It is mostly a young plantation with old ruins and contour features.
The whole area,criss-crossed by an extensive path nextwork, gives great variety of both easy and technical orienteering.

The mill workers park and the Coppice were bequeathed by William Peel to the people of Accrington town in 1909, with the scarp of mature conifers being planted in 1972/3. The curious maze of ditches on the top moor were dug by Italian POWs in WWII as a defence against Luftwaffe gliders landing. They were entirely successful in this endeavour, but unwittingly bequeathed some novel navigation to later generations.
Plantation Road was where the mill owners great houses once stood by a cobbled highway, but now the house grounds are a plantation where you can now run under the canopy.