New Hall Valley Country Park is a country park located in New Hall Valley between Walmley and Wylde Green in the Sutton Coldfield area of north Birmingham. It is the first new country park in the UK for over a decade. The park is split into "phases".
It was created in 2005 by Birmingham City Council with funding raised from the release of land for the New Hall Manor Estate development and formally opened on August 29, 2005.
The park covers over 160 acres (0.6 km²) of designated green belt land to the south east of Sutton Park, including ancient woodland, historic wetland grazing meadows, former farmland, and part of Plants Brook. It borders on a number of privately owned listed buildings including the 17th century Grade II listed New Hall Mill, a corn mill. This is one of only two working water mills surviving in Birmingham water mills in Birmingham, with the other being Sarehole Mill in Hall Green. It has been restored and is open to the public on certain days or by prior arrangement. Bishop Walsh Catholic School borders the land, with the school's playing fields running adjacent for nearly 1.5 miles.
The park also includes a network of cycle routes and footpaths (52°33′03″N 1°48′25″W / 52.550930°N 1.806816°W / 52.550930; -1.806816, a plant nursery, a nature conservation site and two play areas for children.
The park is crossed by Wylde Green Road, which links Walmley and Wylde Green at either end. This road was crossed by a ford until around 1967.
Coppers Wood, the ancient woodland in the park, is under threat of being destroyed due to concerns that its trees, which are Crack Willow, may fall onto people using the paths that have been driven through them.
Famous quotes containing the words hall, valley, country and/or park:
“Go where he will, the wise man is at home,
His hearth the earth,—his hall the azure dome;
Where his clear spirit leads him, there’s his road,
By God’s own light illumined and foreshadowed.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“Ah! I have penetrated to those meadows on the morning of many a first spring day, jumping from hummock to hummock, from willow root to willow root, when the wild river valley and the woods were bathed in so pure and bright a light as would have waked the dead, if they had been slumbering in their graves, as some suppose. There needs no stronger proof of immortality. All things must live in such a light. O Death, where was thy sting? O Grave, where was thy victory, then?”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“That country where a man can be so crossed;
Can be so battered, badgered and destroyed
That he’s a loveless man....”
—William Butler Yeats (1865–1939)
“The label of liberalism is hardly a sentence to public igominy: otherwise Bruce Springsteen would still be rehabilitating used Cadillacs in Asbury Park and Jane Fonda, for all we know, would be just another overweight housewife.”
—Barbara Ehrenreich (b. 1941)