Category × County
7 Best Parks and Playgrounds In County Down
County Down's seven divide neatly into open-ended and organised. At the open-ended end are Tollymore Forest Park and Wallace Park: walk in, choose your own route, nobody hands you a plan for the afternoon. At the organised end are Pickie Family Fun Park, Ark Open Farm and Airtastic Entertainment Centre Bangor, where the visit is built round specific things to ride, feed or bounce on. Most families already know which of the two they are, and the trouble starts when the adults want one and the children want the other.
Top parks and playgrounds in County Down
Showing 1–7 of 7
Children's FarmsArk Open Farm
Parks and PlaygroundsTollymore Forest Park
Parks and PlaygroundsWallace Park
SightseeingCastle Ward
Zoos and Wildlife ParksWWT Castle Espie
Theme ParksPickie Family Fun Park
Parks and PlaygroundsAirtastic Entertainment Centre Bangor
WWT Castle Espie and Castle Ward land between the two, with grounds to wander and enough laid on to hold a child who will not walk for the sake of walking. For a mixed-age group those two are the safest single answer in the county. If everybody is over eight and the weather holds, the forest gives you more.
Parks and Playgrounds in County Down: FAQs
Which works best for a mixed-age group?
WWT Castle Espie asks least of you as a referee, and Castle Ward is close behind it. Both put open ground within reach of the older children while keeping something specific and close at hand for the small ones. A forest park will always suit the walkers and frustrate the rest, and a fun park works the other way round. If the age gap is wide and the day is long, the middle ground is worth more than the best individual site.
What is available when the weather is poor?
Four of the seven record indoor space, unusually strong for a listing full of parks. Only Airtastic Entertainment Centre Bangor is genuinely an indoor proposition instead of a place to shelter. Buildings you can spend a while inside exist at Ark Open Farm and at WWT Castle Espie. Tollymore Forest Park and Wallace Park are exactly what they look like, and trees do only so much in real rain.
Is Tollymore a sensible choice with small children?
Yes, so long as you keep your ambitions small. Treat a forest park as a short loop near the entrance and it works beautifully at three or four, because at that age the interest lies in bridges, stones and puddles, not in arriving anywhere. Take a carrier if you want to go further than the child will. The mistake is planning a route by its length on a map and discovering the child had a different length in mind.