Fineshades Country Park
Project Overview
Fineshade Wood, is 313ha of woodland located near Corby, Northamptonshire. The site is popular, with more than 160,000 visits last year. The site has a café, shops, car parks, play areas and a range of trails. There are two play areas at Fineshade Wood, one called the Oak Leaf play area situated next to the visitor centre buildings, aimed at children up to 6 years old.
The second play area situated further into the woodland, is called the Treehouse play area and is designed for children over 6 years old. The projects main focuses of play were, physical, balance and climbing. These were either extended or added onto both existing play areas.
The Outcome
The Oak Leaf Area is where a Robinia trim trail was added to extend on the existing balance play. In addition to this, the Tree House Area is where an extra platform onto the existing tree house play structure was added to create more access points. In addition, we added a tube slide and replaced all of their existing ropes like for like. The majority of the timber in our design for this was Robinia in keeping with their existing rustic look.
This project included some new additions and modifications to their existing play features. Within the main playground we relocated a number of existing features incorporating them with our new trim trail additions to make the garden more purposeful. Within the area there were some existing features that needed maintenance works and painting to freshen them and give the area a full fresh look.
Within the second phase was a large Robinia structure which was modified with a new Robinia tower, replacements of all ropes and nets to make the feature safe for public use again. The area was then finished with hardwood play bark chips to provide a safe surface to protect against falls.
Fineshade country park is a space of natural beauty which attracts a huge number of visitors throughout the year. Because of the foot traffic on this site careful consideration was made to plan, coordinate and segregate the sites to ensure all staff and visitors were safe whilst the work was taking place. As the setting included two separate areas, Timotay worked closely with the on-site rangers to plan a phased approach to reduce the impact on the site. This allowed the country park to communicate with their visitors so they could share their investment plans and the temporary closures of the areas.
Deliveries were scheduled and supervised by Timotay to ensure safe access and egress and controlled lifting operations within a designated material offload point to ensure all visitors were safely segregated.
