Grange Valley Nature Reserve: tributary habitat in Preston

A green corridor running through the eastern suburbs, and the reserve most used as an everyday route.

Grange Valley Nature Reserve follows a small tributary valley through eastern Preston, alongside the Grange Park district. Like most of the city's reserves it exists because the ground was too steep and too wet for housing, and the valley kept its cover while the streets went in on either side.

That siting makes it the most ordinary of the reserves in use. It functions as a green corridor between residential streets, so the paths are better worn than at Boilton Wood and the site is busier with local walkers than with visitors.

The eastern arc of the Guild Wheel passes nearby, and Grange Park is immediately adjacent, which makes the two a sensible pairing: formal park, then valley.

Why the reserves are where they are

What follows from this one being a route is that it wears like a route: the paths take the traffic, and what the reserve is actually managed for sits a few metres either side of them.

Grange Valley is a tributary, and tributary valleys behave differently from the main river: they are narrow, they cut deeper relative to their width, and they carry the corridor inland into the suburbs. That is why this site functions as a green route through eastern Preston, and seldom as a destination.

Ground conditions, and how it is used

None of these is a surfaced site, and a tributary valley concentrates that. The sides are steeper than the main river's because the stream cuts deeper relative to its width, so the path spends more of its length on a slope than a floodplain route would, and after rain the fall of the ground moves water across it rather than along it. The nature reserves sheet covers the group; the municipal parks are the graded alternative.

Most people meet a site like this while going somewhere else, and it is worth understanding that way. Grange Park is the neighbourhood park beside it, and the two together are how the eastern suburbs reach open ground on foot.

Reaching it from the city

Grange Valley is the easiest of the three to reach on foot, because the valley runs inland into the suburbs rather than along the river: the eastern arc of the Guild Wheel passes the top of it, and the walk out through Grange Park arrives at the reserve from the residential side.

A tributary valley is easier to reach than the main corridor because it runs inland into the suburbs: Grange Park is beside it, and the two together are how eastern Preston reaches open ground on foot without going down to the river.