The Sky Trail at Holme Pierrepont Country Park runs on two levels, 12 feet and 24 feet, with wobbly bridges and zip wires, plus a low-level "Sky Tykes" course for children from the age of two. It sits inside a 270-acre park built around a reshaped gravel pit, which is the thing to understand about Holme Pierrepont before anything else: it is a village that shares its parish with a 2,000-metre regatta lake, a white-water slalom course and a water-ski lagoon with its own jump and cableway.
The land explains the name. "Holme" is Old English and Norse for low-lying ground by a river, and the village sits on exactly that, in a bend of the Trent east of Nottingham. "Pierrepont" is Norman French for stone bridge, after the family who held the manor from 1257, when Sir Henry Pierrepont married Annora de Manvers, the heiress who brought them the estate.
There's no pub trading in the village itself — CAMRA's directory draws a blank for Holme Pierrepont. The nearest options are the café and bar at the Water Sports Centre, known online as the "TEN66 cafe," and the pubs of West Bridgford two miles off: the Stratford Haven, the Waterside Bar and Kitchen, the Poppy and Pint. The café is dog-friendly, as is the campsite behind it, the Rafters field.
For something quieter, Holme Pierrepont Hall runs its own tea room — cash only, homemade cakes and scones, tea and hot chocolate by a fireplace, in a room one visitor described as having "a pleasant atmosphere."
The Hall dates to around 1500 and is reckoned the earliest brick building in Nottinghamshire, still lived in by descendants of the family who built it. The Courtyard Garden, laid out in 1875 to mark a coming-of-age, keeps its box parterre filled with lavender and golden oregano, roses and wisteria on the walls.
St Edmund's Church next door is Grade I listed and crowded with the family's monuments. Sir Henry Pierrepont's alabaster effigy of 1499 rests its head on a helm carved with a fox passant crest; his will asked to be buried "among his worshipful ancestors." The poet John Oldham died at the Hall of smallpox in 1683, aged 30, a guest of the Earl of Kingston — John Dryden wrote his eulogy. A brass to an unknown lady, cut in 1385, turned up during floor repairs in 1960.
Domesday valued the whole manor at £6 to the lord, with 16 households and a single mill. In 1960 the Central Electricity Generating Board wanted to build a power station here, two 600-foot chimneys and eight cooling towers; a public inquiry threw it out on green belt grounds, and the Water Sports Centre arrived instead, in 1971.
Walkers can pick up the Trent Valley Way through the country park and follow the river towards Colwick, crossing into Nottingham on the new Waterside Bridge. There's also mini golf, cycle and Segway hire, archery combat, and four new covered padel courts. Nottingham station is the nearest mainline stop, with the 11C bus running direct to the Watersports Centre gate, and West Bridgford about five minutes away by car. Parking runs £2 off-peak, £5 at weekends.
On a still morning before the ropes course opens, the regatta lake belongs to the rowers, going up and down in lines, past a village that has been watching the Trent for about a thousand years longer than the boats have.
