9 Best Parks and Playgrounds In Dorset

Borough Gardens and Upton Country Park will most likely work with no preparation at all: laid-out grounds, paths a pushchair manages, play equipment and somewhere to sit. Whitecliff Play Area answers the category most literally: a play area, not a park with one tucked in a corner. The estate and walk entries come into their own once children can cover ground on their own feet without a negotiation every few hundred paces.

Because Dorset's open-space listings get filed together regardless of what is on site. Portland Plateau Walk is a route, not a destination with facilities, and Kingston Lacy is a ticketed house and garden where the gardens do the family work. Both are good days out and neither is a playground. The category reads best as a list of outdoor options and never as a promise of equipment.

Very little. Just two of the nine list anything under a roof, and on this kind of site that tends to mean a tea room or a visitor centre, never a space to occupy children. The workable answer on a wet Dorset day is either the ticketed sites, which have buildings, or a different category altogether. Waterproofs turn a poor forecast into a usable one at any of the open parks, but nothing here will keep a family dry for a whole afternoon.

Not much. They sit in a narrow band near the top, which is normal for parks: people who bother to review one usually enjoyed it, and the sample is small. More useful separators are whether the site has parking, whether it has play equipment as opposed to lawns, and whether you want an hour or an afternoon. The scores answer none of those three questions.