Ay up, everyone! It's Hanley Bear here, with a post about Hanley Park - or 'Me Park' as I like to call it. I went there with Polar and Grizzly one evening last month.
Great as it would be to have a park named after me, Me Park is much older than I am and was laid out in Victorian times. Quite recently, the friends of the park made a successful bid to the National Lottery for funds to restore some of the broken Victorian structures and the gardens, and now it's a park that I can be very proud of, although bad humans have started damaging some of the things again.
This is one of my favourite Victorian features, the fountain in the Caldon Grounds, part of the park in front of a big college. One of Polar's work friends got some amazing photos of it in winter, when all the water froze!
If you look carefully, you can see Grizzly being a good human and picking up other people's litter. We wish humans wouldn't drop litter, as it is bad for plants and animals and makes nice places look scruffy and sad.
Across the road from the Caldon Grounds is the main part of Hanley Park, which has a boating lake, a nature pond, a bandstand and café, a bowling green, great play areas for human cubs, tennis courts, playing fields, flower borders and the Caldon Canal! It's exactly what a good park should be!
The grass around the lake is smothered in thousands of little daisies. Humans used to spray nasty things to kill them all off, but they have learned how to look after nature much better now, as you can see from the nature pond.
There aren't any rowing boats on the lake at the moment. It would be very cool if there were some that humans could hire on nice days, so they could row around the little islands but the gulls, ducks and geese have the lake all to themselves for now.
But this is an example of naughty human behaviour. All these pillars should have decorative balls on top, and they looked brilliant when they did, but some of them have been pushed off and broken, which makes me growl and want to give whoever did it a very, very hard stare.
Here's the main pavilion, where the cafe is, and the bandstand and, in front of both, is the line of the Caldon Canal. You might have seen one of Polar's pictures of it in Sonning's last post about our Caldon Canal journey on Uppie.
It was funny looking down on the canal from the bridge and thinking that we had gone underneath it only a few days earlier! There are mooring rings all through the park so boaters can stop there easily and have a look around the park and an oatcake at the café.
From the bridge, you can see all the way to Stoke Minster in the town of Stoke-upon-Trent, which is on the other side of the main railway line through the city, and you can see the Maer Hills west of Newcastle-under-Lyme too. It is a great view of my home city!
We plan to go again when there are more flowers out in the herbaceous borders, so I will write another post and share some more photos then, but here is a final picture of the fabulous fountain with the sun behind it.
Now I am going to watch some more football...
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