Lightwater Valley, Yorkshire - Non photo TR

[John Thorp]

I quite like Lightwater Valley. The park was quiet - we were afforded three consecutive rides on the giggle inducing 'Trauma Tower' - and the weather was pleasant. However, the park would be a total non-entity without The Ultimate, a big, rolling endless field interspersed with dodgy looking rented travelling rides and sporadic owl exhibits.

 

The Ultimate, as it happens, is a fantastic, quirky, real adventure of a coaster, an extreme scenic railway, akin to an unplanned backpacking trip without guidebooks. You'll come back slightly bruised, with less cash than you began with, and somewhat exhausted, but you'd happily do it all again. Unless you hate rough coasters, in which case you'll cry.

 

Whilst the first half is all jolly (yet still surprisingly harsh) dipping and turning, culminating with a series of absolutely pointless miniscule bunny hops, The Ultimate's British Rail engineered (no, really) second half is we're the 'fun' starts. The second lift hill takes a Yorkshire hour, offering unsuspecting riders a good while to look back on how far away from the main park they've come, and how far they have to go back, using track they... well, track they can't even see. This return journey on the world's longest operating rollercoaster will take far too long, surely? Far from it.

 

The twisting and turning third act of the coaster is a perfect exercise in terror inducing mild brutality, with the train taking corners and twists of vartious variety with a speed and force which, particularly at the back of the train, seems frankly unsafe. But it's also, at least in my opinion, absolutely hilarious. The track of the ride only comes back into view once the train has finished throwing riders violently through a tiny dark tunnel, by which time it's finally run out of steam, crawling gently back to the station - it's surely false advertising to have something that looks so unnasuming showing itself off like that. A massively underated 'experience'.

 

Also, worth riding is 'The Rat Coaster', 'The Rat' or 'The Rat Ride', depending on where in the park you are. A relic from the days the park was doing quite well, the queue is a creepy tunnel underground into a small sewer network, with an actual stream of water running under foot. The ride itself is smooth, fast and fun, taking place in complete darkness. When you're finished with The Supermassive Rat Hole, or whatever it's titled at that particular time of day, you can ride 'The Grizzly Bear', a ride exactly like 'Rat' except with the unique novelty of being in broad daylight!

 

Eagle's Claw is a KMG Afterbuner in the middle of a largely incovenient field operated on our visit by a kindly old chap named Ray. Although he gave long and varied cycles on manual operation, he was the slowest, oddest ride operator I've ever met, and would probably suit work in a butchers more than a small theme park.

 

Once you're done with such 'family sized' excitement, you can visit 'The Toad Hole', the centrepiece of the innuendo square area of the park, home to the 'Munchbox' and 'Ring Toss', and new for this year, 'Skyrider', a 'rock n' roll ride!' The park's website has yet to revela the mystery identity of this investment, but it is in fact a... travelling Wavewsinger! Just like the one the park got rid of two years ago!

 

Oh yes, The Toad Hole. The precursor to 'proper' water coasters, guests climb a hill to the small entry to the hole, and wait in a tiny room for a few minutes. Here, the entertainment is hearing something or other quite drastic and weird going on inside. It's a Hitchcockian exercise in suspense. Eventually, they are invited into a darkened shed of a station with a very faint 'Wind in the Willows' theme, featuring paintings you can barely see and a 6 second loop of sound effects. Guests are then invited into a damp crate with a few benches. The ride operator dissapears, and the lights dissapear entirely. Suddenly, young and old alike are shocked, surprised and confused by a small, plastic, freakish puppet that says in the sound quality of a Casio Cassette player, something along the lines of, "You will beg for your life!" The crate shunts forward and drops in darkness, then up a section of track, out the foretold 'Toad Hole' and splashes oddly into a murky pond, next to where the queue began. Missing the unloading dock by a fair margin, the boat then mysteriously shunts backwards, and people leave, usually confused. It is at this point it becomes apparent the boat is in fact attached to a rough looking piece of rope, the job of which is to drag the empty boat back into the hole. Smashing.

 

For a clear illustration of the sort of park LWV is these days, you only have to stand in the entrance area. It's an enclosed plaza, with really nice, quaint looking themed buildings and kiosks, a theatre marquee and a coffee shop. Glancing upwards, you're greeted by a filthy, green plastic barn roof.

 

The park is fairly entertaining, although I'd argue even £15.99 is a bit much. The ride close was 5PM, but most rides closed ten or fifteen minutes before that - I'd imagine Eagle's Claw finished around 4PM if our friend Ray wanted half a chance of catching Mexico V. Argentina. Like most UK parks, Legoland and PBB being the notable exceptions, the catering was crap. The food was shoddily prepared in front of you, and when we visited 'The Pub in the Wood', the guests inside looked like locals that were about to beat us up, which is odd in a paid admission theme park. The park advertises a nice little shopping village at the entrance, which was nonsensically closed when everybody streamed out, along with the Birds of Prey centre.

 

With Flamingoland seemingly determined to become a kind of Busch Gardens for Hull, I hope a park with as much potential as LWV begins to improve over the next few years, as a park can only live on rented ex-travelling rides, occasional owl appearances and scout trips for so long.

Here I am, enjoying the ring toss!