Trent Country Park

What a lovely park to host a 5k race. It features hundreds of acres of maintained woodland interspersed with fields and streams, making for a great trail run experience. It’s easy to get lost even with a well-​marked race route! A little-​known bit of history about the park is that the Georgian hunting lodge was used as a POW camp for German officers and was heavily bugged. The British were able to learn all the Nazi plans, but were unable to act on many of them due to the various levels of military intelligence involved, and subsequently the Cold War. It was as important as Bletchley but receives none of the prestige as it was all ordinary translation and not high-​tech codebreaking.
I’d really love to go go back and try the Go Ape high ropes course — looks a blast but we were exhausted from the race!

We recently discovered Trent Park and have so far been a couple of times. It’s beautiful wide, open spaces, a café which we’ve yet to try, a couple of playgrounds, a duck pond that my little boy was fascinated by and an animal enclosure that my kids loved. It’s a great place to go out for a walk and in the summer to take a picnic along to. Judging by what arnolp04 has to say about the place — we’ve only scratched the surface.

A wonderful place to escape the rat-​race. It’s a massive country park in Cockfosters, right at the end of the Piccadilly Line. It includes: a wood, hundreds of acres of fields, nature trails, a golf course, an equestrian centre, a lake and at the far end of the park an ornate Japanese Water Garden. It really is a beautiful area. Sometimes, there are open-​air concerts in the summer.
If you want to keep the kids amused there’s also a small animal park.
There’s a cafeteria near the main entrance, although I’m not a fan of it, so I tend to bring a picnic.