Health & Wellbeing

We manage Wandlebury Country Park and Coton Countryside Reserve to act as “green lungs” for the Cambridge area, providing a space for people of all ages to enjoy the outdoors, experience nature and heritage and get exercise and fresh air.

Wandlebury receives around 100,000 visits during the year. Across all our sites we maintain over 10 miles of footpaths for walkers and some routes for cyclists and horse-riders as well.

“ Over 40 years of research shows that experiences of nature are linked to a remarkable breadth of positive health outcomes…including improved physical health, improved mental wellbeing, greater social wellbeing, and positive health behaviours.”

Shanahan et al, Nature Journal, 6, (2016)

We provide a dawn-to-dusk Warden service at Wandlebury to support visitors, as well as maintaining public facilities such as toilets, car parks, den building area and information.

Our successful Healthy Walk programme at Wandlebury has an average of more than 50 people each week. We are grateful to the volunteers that run this scheme. Click here to find out about our Healthy Walks.

We organise green gym activities that enable volunteers to get physically active whilst helping to improve habitats and care for our heritage.

Join Us

We work in partnership with Headway Cambridgeshire, offering regular volunteering activities to help with brain injury and mental health and we also have a partnership with the charity Parkinson’s UK, who organise an annual fundraising walk at Wandlebury.

With the resources available to us, we do what we can to enable and encourage access for all.

At Coton Countryside Reserve we have built a concrete path – download a map of the walking trails.

At Wandlebury visitors with disabilities can park for free and we are fundraising for an all terrain mobility scooter. Wandlebury is visited weekly by social care groups, such a Larkfield Adult Day Centre in Ely: