Brockholes: the nature reserve east of Preston

The only entry in this directory that is genuinely a destination, and not a venue.

Brockholes is a nature reserve east of Preston, on the River Ribble, run by the Lancashire Wildlife Trust. Its distinguishing feature is a floating visitor village — buildings on a pontoon on the lake — which is unusual enough to be the reason most people have heard of it.

The site was former gravel workings, which is why the lakes are there and why the habitat is what it is: open water, reedbed and young woodland, with nothing ancient about it. That makes it a good complement to Preston's own nature reserves, which are mostly river-corridor woodland.

It sits close to the eastern arc of the Guild Wheel and to Boilton Wood, so the three can be combined on foot or by bike.

How it differs from Preston's own reserves

The city's own nature reserves are fragments of the Ribble floodplain: woodland, scrub and wet grassland on land nobody could build on, with earth paths and no facilities. Brockholes is the opposite in almost every respect — a made landscape on former workings, with open water as its principal habitat and a building to arrive at.

That makes the two complementary, and never alternatives. The reserves show what the corridor does when left alone; Brockholes shows what a floodplain gravel site becomes when it is deliberately flooded and planted. Anybody interested in the Ribble as a system is better served seeing both than choosing between them.

Reaching it, and combining it

It sits east of the city close to the motorway, which makes it the easiest reserve in the district to drive to and the only one with parking designed for the purpose. It is also close to the eastern arc of the Guild Wheel, so it can be reached by bike from the city on a surfaced route.

On foot the natural combination is with Boilton Wood and the Ribble bank, which puts ancient woodland, river corridor and made wetland into one walk.

The corridor it belongs to

The Ribble east of Preston runs in a shallow wooded valley that was never worth building on, and it is the most interesting side of the city. Six nature reserves sit along it, the eastern arc of the Guild Wheel follows it, and beyond them the land rises towards Longridge and the Bowland fringe.

Further east across the river are Samlesbury Hall and Hoghton Tower, which sit outside the boundary because they were never town buildings at all.