Ladybank’s Parks & Woods

A walk through Ladybank village, it’s parks and some nearby woodlands.

Rudy had a good sleep on his train to Ladybank and lost track of time a bit so arrived thinking he’d maybe missed his lunch. That decided our first destination should be somewhere to snack before a proper explore of the village. We foudn a tiny park almost hidden in the centre of the village at Well Road. There’s a children’s play area and a grassy bank with just a couple of trees at the top end catching all the sunshine. The trees were rather short of leaves for our visit but the April sun in Scotland isn’t too harsh to sit out in for a nice picnic.

After eating half our lunch we headed up Hill Street (not steep at all despite it’s name) and onwards to the Beech Avenue playing fields. The pitches looked sparsely used recently with only very faint markings but there’s plenty of space to walk round the edge of the park even if sports are happening. Today Rudy got to sniff around all the open grass for as long as he wanted. It’s a lovely place in the sun with an open view back to the village church

After some good sniffing investigations of the parks we walked along the public path to Edentown (or “Edenstown” as the signpost calls it). Edentown is a collection of about a dozen houses at the roadside surrounded by forest woodlands – which is where we were heading. The path sits between Eden’s Muir woodland and sheep fields, the fence on both sides is in good condition but even mildly curious dogs like Rudy are best under very close control on leads when there may be lambs around. We didn’t manage to see any today though Rudy definitely knew where they were just out of sight!

Less than a mile from the train station, Heatherhall Wood is the largest of the Forestry Commission woods on this side of Ladybank and has a great network of paths throughout. There are wide access tracks cutting across the centre, good walking/cycling trails, and smaller winding routes for exploring the more hidden parts of the woods. On the far western edge the view lies across open farmland to the Lomond Hills and there are a few benches & picnic tables here. This was definitely the spot to properly finish our picnic lunch as it was such a lovely day to sit on the edge of a forest looking at the hills.
Heatherhall Wood and the neighbouring Eden’s Muir & Monkstown Wood stretch over one square kilometre of mostly coniferous forest. Rudy spent almost two hours here before heading for his train home.

We had such a nice afternoon exploring the woods on the western side of Ladybank that we’re already thinking to revisit as there are another three named woods to the east of the village and then three more a little further to the north!

The Ladybank Forest Users Group is possibly no longer active but their influence on the facilities available at the woods we visited was still visible in the access, paths network and information boards. The Ladybank woods we visited definitely felt well loved by the community.