12 Best Swimming Pools In Devon

Only one of them tells you so, and it does it in the name: Dartmouth Heated Outdoor Swimming Pool. For the rest, our records hold nothing either way. This matters more than any other single detail, because a heated outdoor pool is somewhere children stay in until they are ordered out, and an unheated one on a grey day is a fast lesson in disappointment. Settle it before you pack the towels, not when you are standing at the edge.

Small pools kept alive by the towns around them tend to be reviewed by the people who use them every week, and that produces warmer scores than a large centre serving a whole city ever gets. It is not a trick, but it is worth reading correctly. A high rating here is telling you that the place is loved and well looked after, rather than that it is large or has slides. Go expecting a simple pool that people care about and the score makes sense.

Three of the twelve record indoor space and none of them appear among the eight best rated, so you will need the full county list to find them. That is an odd position for a county to be in and it has a practical consequence: in Devon, this category is largely a fair-weather one. If you want a swim that is entirely independent of the sky, this is not the list that will give it to you quickly.

More than a large leisure centre would ever require. Small community pools commonly run on limited sessions, sometimes with lessons or clubs taking large parts of the day, and none of that appears in our records. A wasted journey here is much more likely than at a large centre, and much easier to avoid with one look at the pool's own page. Do that first, then decide, rather than picking the highest rated and hoping.