From Benarty or Kelty you can enjoy this great park.
Lochore Meadows Country Park is a place of great beauty that is totally accessible for all the family to enjoy the walks, leisure and outdoor activities as well as taking in the wildlife and countryside.
You can access the park by car driving into the park from the Benarty side at Crossshill or walk into the park from the Kelty side by parking in the area of the old Railway Station off the Great North Road. The pathway that goes round the whole Loch is a great walk enjoyed by thousands of people every year and the café in the visitors centre offers snacks, refreshments and light meals as a halfway house on your way round the loch. So for those wishing to walk off the extra pounds put on over the festive season, then get along to the ‘Meedies’ as it is known locally!
The Country Park is one of Fifes best used visitor attractions with over 650,000 visitors a year going through the park and it is on our doorstep!
The park offers many attractions including an outdoor education centre where you can sign up for courses on navigation, hill walking, rock climbing, canoeing and Kayaking, dinghy sailing, mountain biking, orienteering and ski-ing. From April to October you can hire dinghys and canoes and there is a Meedies mountain bike club and a number of different tracks all built by local groups.
As well as a large outdoor play area for children there is Ranger led activities, interpretive trails a beach, picnic tables and barbeques. The park boasts a nine hole state of the art golf course (par72 for 18) and a putting green is open from the beginning of March through to the end of September. And off course there is a café with lots of nice food and drinks! For those who enjoy fishing there is a 260 acre loch stocked with Rainbow and Brown Trout with fly fishing from 1 March to 31 May and bait and spinning from 1 June to 30 November. Day bank and boat tickets are available at the centre.
The history of the Lochore Meadows Country Park is quite fascinating giving that the whole area is reclaimed from a degraded and scarred landscape that was the inheritance left to the people of the area following the pit closures in the 1950’s and 1960’s. There were seven pits in the area around the park where deep shafts had been created with the opening of the Lindsay Pit in 1873, the Nellie Pit 1880, the Aitken Pit 1895, Lumphinnans Pit 1896, Glencraig Pit 1896, the Mary Pit 1904 and Benarty Pit 1945. All these pits closed between 1959 and 1966 and the reclamation work which has won international acclaim as well as prestigious conservation awards took place between 1967 and 1976.
On a visit to the park you can view many of the photos of that time and the work that took place to bring the park to the great place of beauty that it is today as well as learning more about the history of those hard times the local mining communities lived through. The visitors centre offers a host of information as well as a conference centre and off course a café with great food!
Lochore Meadows Country Park is a great facility on our door step, well worth a visit!
