Lickey Hills Country Park
Lickey Hills Country Park is a country park in Worcestershire, ten miles south-west of Birmingham and twenty-four miles north-east of Worcester. The park extends over 524 acres of the Lickey Hills. It is one of the oldest parks managed by Birmingham City Council. The hills in the park rise to 978 feet above sea level at Beacon Hill.
The park exists in its current form only through the activities and generosity of the early 20th-century philanthropic Birmingham Society for the Preservation of Open Spaces who purchased Rednal Hill and later arranged for Pinfield Wood and Bilberry Hill to be permanently leased on a nominal peppercorn rent. The society included such prominent and public spirited luminaries as T Grosvenor Lee, Ivor Windsor-Clive, 2nd Earl of Plymouth and several elders of the Cadbury family led by George Cadbury and his wife Dame Elizabeth Cadbury. The society gave the original park to the people of Birmingham in 1888, with further tracts being added progressively until 1933. The park has thus been preserved as a free-entry public open space.
The Lickey Hills immediately became popular as a recreation area and attendance numbers exploded between 1924 and 1953 while the tram service connected with the terminus at Rednal. As early as 1919 as many as 20,000 visitors were recorded on a single August Bank Holiday Monday. The current Country Park status was established with the support of the Countryside Commission in 1971.
History
- Location map: 52°22’36"N, 2°-0’37"W
- Streetmap: SO994754
In 1888 the Birmingham Society for the Preservation of Open Spaces purchased Rednal Hill and handed it to the City in trust. They also arranged for Pinfield Wood and Bilberry Hill to be leased on a nominal rent. Birmingham City Council finally purchased Cofton Hill, Lickey Warren and Pinfield Wood outright in 1920. With the eventual purchase of the Rose Hill Estate from the Cadbury family in 1923, free public access was finally restored to the entire hills.
In 1904 Mr and Mrs Barrow Cadbury gave the Lickey Tea Rooms building at the bottom of Rose Hill to the people of Birmingham, as a place of rest and refreshment and it remained open until the late 1960s. The building still stands but is in use as the Bilberry Hill Centre, a hostel and sports facility run by Birmingham Clubs for Young People nestling at the base of Bilberry Hill. The hostel can accommodate up to 65 persons.[1]
For many Birmingham and Black Country people, the Lickey Hills were a traditional day out. When the Birmingham tram network was extended to the Rednal terminus it would carry the crowds from all over the city to the Lickeys. There are records of crowds as far back as the Rose and Crown on busy Sundays, as families queued for the trams to take them home. The terminus and tram tracks were removed in 1953.
Obelisk and toposcope
On the road from Lickey to Lickey Beacon there is an obelisk folly commemorating Other Archer Windsor, 6th Earl of Plymouth, who created the Worcestershire Yeomanry volunteer regiment of cavalry, which served in the Napoleonic Wars. The obelisk, which is well hidden from the road, is inscribed with the words "To commend to imitation the exemplary private virtues of Other Archer 6th Earl of Plymouth."
Just a thousand yards north of the monument, on top of Beacon Hill, is the toposcope made in the early twentieth century by the Cadbury family, standing next to the Ordnance Survey triangulation point. A small castellated structure was built to rehouse the toposcope in 1988 to celebrate the centenary of the park. It is 974 feet above sea level and provides the best views, of the city and surrounding counties, that the park provides.
Amenities
The park includes an 18-hole non-membership golf course, the first such municipal facility in the country which was noted as one of the most difficult municipal golf courses in the country in the 1970s by Tony Jacklin. Also included within the park boundary is a bowling green, tennis and putting green as well as a purpose-built wheelchair pathway and viewing platform allowing easy access to panoramic views over the surrounding countryside.
A visitor centre opened in April 1990.
Outside links
References
- Margaret Mabey, A Little History of the Lickey Hills, The Lickey Hills Society, 1993, ISBN 0-9519839-1-1