Gnoll Visitors Centre

The Gnoll country park is beautiful throughout the year and there are actually 4 lakes if you are prepared to walk a bit further than the visitor centre. I’ve always found the staff very friendly and I would just like to add that there is now a charge for parking but its only £1.

Good place to go if you have children wonderful play areas and a mass scenery your constantly finding new interesting things they have a bamboo forest which you can walk through and a visitors centre with a café and a small gift shop

The Gnoll Visitors Centre is located adjacent to the carpark for the Gnoll Country Park. Parking is free and there’s usually plenty of room — except on the rare sunny summer day.
The Centre itself contains an information area and a small café.
The food is lovely in the café. I usually have a mug of milky coffee and my son loves the sausage baps — with lots of tomato sauce, of course. There’s plenty of choice on the menu — great homecooked food, including soup, salads, jacket potatoes, toasted sandwiches etc. The prices are reasonable as well.
At the reception desk you can buy little gifts, and they also sell bags of bird food — essential for little ones to feed the ducks.
I would highly recommend this place — it’s easily accessible, including for disabled people. There’s also plenty for children to do.
And finally — a lovely place to visit before Christmas — there’s Santa’s grotto there, and they do the best Christmas lunches that I’ve ever tasted (except for my own!).

Over the years the Gnoll Park has changed a lot and when they added the Visitors Centre it was certainly a change for the better.
The centre is situated next to the children’s play area and the lake which has a huge variety of ducks, which is always a firm favourite with the children and you can purchase bags of food for them from the shop inside the Visitors Centre.
There is a wealth of information on offer for both children and adults and the centre is a firm favourite with my granddaughter (though I suspect that the food and the ducks have a big part to play in this).
All in all an excellent day out for everyone and best of all it’s free, including the parking.

It’s a lovely park very close to where we live, with a large lake and some small ones, where people like to feed the ducks and swans (and occasional seagulls). Great for walks in the woodland and around the lakes. The café is quite good and fairly inexpensive, though not much for vegetarians (why can’t cafes keep some veggie burgers in the freezer to offer in addition to all the meat burgers?) Today there was a potato and cheese pie on offer which looked nice, though more choice would be good. The staff weren’t particularly friendly, though not actually hostile. They could try to be a bit more welcoming though. On the plus side, it’s pleasant on the inside of the building with occasional school exhibits and information about the park, and large windows overlooking the largest lake. There are also a few tables outside.