LEI Country
Knighton Park and Spinney
Permanent Orienteering Course available
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Lying two miles to the south of the centre of Leicester this beautiful 78 acre park offers colourful shrub borders, a water garden, heather woodlands, play areas and a rock garden.
Knighton village appears in the Domesday Book under its Scandinavian name of Cnihetone.
In the 1720's, Edmund Cradock, a woollen draper of Leicester bought Knighton Hall and its associated farmland. In the years that followed, the family acquired almost all the land in the parish. Knighton Hall is now the official residence of the Vice Chancellor of Leicester University and the name of the Cradock is preserved in the Cradock pub. The City Council bought land just before the Second World War with the intention of establishing a park but work was not begun until 1953.
In 1840 oak trees were planted to form the enclosed spinney to help provide oak wood for future shipbuilding. To make the oaks grow tall and straight, ash were planted in between them. Later Cradocks decided to keep the woodland as a fox covert and in 1932 a covenant was published declaring that the spinney should be a nature reserve for all time.
The Wash (or Saffron) Brook flows through the park and is bordered by trees and herbs in the northern area. There are various avenues in the park, including the laburnum avenue close to the spinney and the gingko (maidenhair) avenue in the heath garden. A charming path bordered by magnolias runs across the middle of the park. In addition to the spinney there are blocks of newly planted woodland consisting of a lime wood, a beech wood and a willow wood.
The park has been used for orienteering for many years and has a permanent orienteering course.
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