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Delamere Forest

by Alec and Val Scaresbrook

A very popular place so plan your ride to avoid weekends, when there's a lot of car traffic around.

The switchback road is lined with beautiful broad-leaved trees providing pleasant shade in summer and delightful colours in autumn, and is well supplied with laybys and picnic sites. The forest is criss-crossed with paths for pedestrians and routes for cyclists, including mountain bike trails.

The public have been coming here in droves, by train and car, for years and there are plenty of facilities including a visitor centre plus shop selling books and maps, educational facilities and a ranger service. There are free leaflets giving details of routes, including walks to view (from a distance) the iron age Eddisbury hill fort and see the long-disused Roman road that linked York and Chester. From the track near the visitor centre, you can also see the modern tree nursery where tree seedlings are nurtured for supply to other forests south of a line from Merseyside to the Humber.

The area to the south of the present day woods, marked on maps as the Old Pale, marks the large enclosure (around 182ha/450 acres) made in 1337 to hold deer. The deer population was wiped out during the Civil War and it wasn't considered feasible to restock afterwards because the woods had also been depleted and there was little shelter left for the animals. Replanting occurred much later, with oak and pine in the 19th century, and further plantings in the early 20th century. Now the largest block of established woodland in Cheshire (785 hectares/1940 acres), Delamere Forest is extremely important for wildlife because of its mix of age and type of trees that create diverse habitats.See the map below