Dear old Wiki tells me that the park is 22 acres in size and is one of the Victorian parks of the city. Didn’t know that. It also has a boulodrome and last year was awarded a Green Flag award!
I quite like this park because there are lots of boulders. I like boulders. I had to ask a couple of people if they would move so I could get a photo of the boulders. These boulders (this word looks silly now) are thought to be more glacial erratics! Lots of these scattered around the place. If all of the Cotteridge Park rocks are glacial erratics, that gives a total of 10 found so far, since I started the blog.
Every year there is a small free festival in Cotteridge
Park, called CoCoMad.
I went last year (it was very muddy) and it was BRILLIANT. A good day out
despite the rain! There are stalls selling crafts and merch and food, a main
stage and an acoustic tent area, a shopping trolley pageant and all sorts of
other fun stuff.
Cotteridge has Anglo-Saxon roots and the name is first recorded in the early 1300s. There
is quite an in-depth history written here which
is worth a read if you want to know more!
Cotteridge Park is also on Twitter!
More pics:
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| A pretty awesome willow tunnel! |
I was born in 1941 in Midland Road which runs down one side of Cotteridge Park my mother told me that the air raid siren was sounding the night I was born in and that they used to open doors and Windows so the blast of a bomb would not suck the glass out as it was very thin glass then.To see this information and the pictures brings back many good memories of playing in this park and the fair that used to come every year.
ReplyDeleteThis is a park where I grew up. The play area used to be towards the top if the park in the dip. The larger muddy Jill dropping down into the original play area was where we tested our running metal to see if we could run from the top to the bottom without face planting ourselves.
ReplyDeleteAlthough it can cause damage to them we used to climb all of the trees and play army games with bits of old sticks.
Our mum used to work at Cadbury in Bournville and we'd climb our favourite tree and sit and wait for her to walk up the hill to walk home with her.
We had some great friends around Cotteridge: Calvin, Simon, Jason, Lee, Sandy, Tony, Steve and a host of others.
The park always seemed to work in zones where kids would stay in their nearest zone to their house. So the kids who lived in Bournville would stay at the top mainly and the kids from Cotteridge would generally stay at the top of the park.
The "Parkie"(park keeper) was in residence every day and we'd knock on his hut door and ask for water on the hot summer days, something that was always courteously met with a yes.
When Autumn came we'd amass all of the fallen leaves in any given area and then make a deep pile and jump into it throwing the rustic looking leaves high into the air....simple old fashioned fun.
I suppose as strange as I find children sat st home nowadays playing indoors on a sunny day then they may find my childhood antics strange too....the thing is I wouldn't change mine or my friends memories and adventures at all...I think we were the original "Call of Duty" kids but at least we learnt to fall over, take risks, laugh with our friends, cry sometimes, be scared, deal with bullies, and socialise.....I wish all kids could enjoy the same fun that we did in Cotteridge park at the ages of 7 and above.....thanks for reading.
Sorry about the typo errors, "Jill" should be "hill" and Bournville kids played at the "bottom" of the park....a couple of other errors but guessing you've worked those out.
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