Beechenhurst - Forestry England

Great place to visit foe a few hours or all day adventure. Plenty of parking, decent kids play area, outdoor picnic tables, cafe etc. Walk a little further and lots of routes to follow, including sculpture trail, Go Ape, and more. You can hire dedicated BBQ space too, which is a great idea - each space comes with dedicated parking, steel bbq, and picnic benches.

I have very fond memories of visiting the Beechenhurst Visitor Centre & Cafe in the Forest of Dean over the years. For as long as I can remember visiting as a child with my parents, then as teenagers and young adults before taking our children or with family & now just visiting as a retired couple to enjoy a good walk along the sculpture trail and then a hot drink & snack at the cafe.

There's plenty of parking; £2 for two hours when the machine's working or £2.36 via the RingGo parking app, so long as you can get a mobile phone signal.

There are so many different walks & on a warm day or even in the winter wrapped up warm it's a great place to visit and to relax. The walks vary in difficulty & length and are all well marked and signed.

They also have ice cream for the pooch, never cheap but it keeps her happy 🐶.

This is a lovely place to go. Loads of green space with a fantastic sculpture trail. Many happy trips here over the years. The only downside is the cafe is definitely expensive now at over £3 for 1 magnum!

Let’s start with the parking shall we… pay and display and it’s a good sized multi level woodland car park Over a few acres. I’m partially disabled which made the 300yd round trip most amusing. There’s maybe two machines to pay. These days there’s a billion ways to pay for parking. They chose the stupidest one. The areas nice for a walk so that’s fine. Now to the ice cream procurement phase… queue at the counter for 5 mins. Told there’s a sign saying pay first and bring receipt( sign is minuscule and not near the queue) . Queue for a further 10 minutes. Come back out to face a further 5 minute queue to swap your receipt for ice cream. Honestly it’s the pay and display of ice cream purchasing. Forestry England. Utter muppets. Bring your own food and drink it’ll be great. Lol

A great place to explore the story book walks. They have done the Gruffalo and Superworm. At the time of writing £7 parking for all day. They have loads of walking and a large play park for all ages. This is complement by a ‘tree top’ GoApe activity.

Great dog friendly day out. We did a short walk - about an hour in total, but you could easily spend the whole day there walking. There seems to be good paths for cycling as well - we saw a fair few cyclists on our short walk.
The cafe is quite comfortable - we had some sandwiches there, which weren’t particularly cheap (£4.50 a sandwich) but were very tasty and good quality none the less.

There’s lots of activities and play areas for the kids. There are some signs for various insects, so there must be some sort of activity trail for the kids to follow.

If you’re a FoD forestry commission member, the parking is free and you get 10% off at the cafe. You’ll quickly break even on the membership when the parking can be £5 for the day.

Really enjoyed the sculpture trail walk. Cafe was nice. Parking was £4 for 4 hours.

Lovely area. Great facilities, cafe a bit expensive but easily sorted by taking a picnic, lovely staff. Clean toilets. Great to have so many options for walks.