Much-loved wildlife park to close forever after 17 years

For 17 years, a small, family-run wildlife park has been the place where sticky-fingered toddlers met lemurs, where first dates stretched into Sunday routines, where volunteers learned the quiet craft of care. Now, it’s packing away its hand-painted signs and closing the gates for good. Rising costs, storm-battered seasons, and a worn-out lease turned a beloved habit into a hard stop. Staff are heartbroken. Neighbours bring cake. Local kids have drawn goodbye cards for the otters.

The morning light slants across the meerkat mound, and you can feel the hush before the doors open — that soft, practical hush of brooms on concrete and zips on keeper jackets. A dad lifts his daughter up to see over the fence, and she waves at a goat like she’s known it her whole life. The café steams up, someone laughs too loudly, and the tannoy crackles into life. The goodbye feels bigger than the place. It lands in the chest and stays there. One sign by the gate says just one word: Goodbye.

A farewell written in pawprints

It starts with a queue that looks ordinary at first — pushchairs, grandparents, teenagers with iced coffees — until you notice the tightness in faces and the way people linger at the noticeboard. The lemur walkthrough, forever the star, has a half-hour queue and the keepers are telling stories like they’re passing on a family recipe. You hear the thud of a falcon’s wings, that dull whoomph that stills a crowd, and the smell of hay and damp wood chips feels like childhood. This is the last weekend for a place that lived by weekends, and every small moment suddenly matters.

A woman in a faded volunteer fleece points to the first photo on her phone: a fox cub in a feed bowl, 2009, all ears and eyes. She taps again and the years flicker by, a highlight reel of muddy boots and birthday badges and a shy lynx that used to sun itself on the same flat rock. A boy presses his hand against the glass where the reptiles sleep and tells me he came here on school trips, then with his nan, then with his own baby son. Tickets sold out for the closing week in a flash. People turned up anyway, just to stand outside and watch the peacocks on the wall.

Why close after all this time? Bills climbed, feed prices jumped, and insurance got twitchy after one brutal winter and two summers of washouts. Schools booked less in exam years, and families spread their days out between cheaper, bigger thrills. Small parks thrive on routine — Saturday memberships, grandparents’ mornings, a steady trickle through the gate — and routine has been hard to hold. Energy costs were the last punch. Staff took pay cuts and cut clever where they could, but a place like this doesn’t print money: it prints memories, and memories don’t pay a £12,000 winter electric bill. We’ve all had that moment when the spreadsheet says what the heart won’t.

What happens to the animals now

Behind the scenes, there’s a choreography to closing that most visitors never see. Accredited parks use studbooks and transfer plans, pairing animals with new homes based on genetics, space, and temperament, not postcode. Crate training starts early and quietly; scent-swapping helps reduce stress; transport routes are mapped down to the lay-by. Vets sign off crates, not just animals, and the soft bedding is layered to smell like home. It’s careful work, slow and calm, because calm is a kindness in transit.

Locals want to help, and there are good ways. Donate to the relocation fund, not random feed drives, and share official updates instead of rumours in the village Facebook group. Buy the last mugs if you can, leave a card at reception, tell a keeper what their talks meant to your kids. Let’s be honest: nobody really does that every day. When you do, it lands. Things to avoid? Don’t offer to “take” an exotic animal, don’t jump fences for a last selfie, don’t speculate about “secret buyers” unless you know. Grief is messy; it doesn’t have to be cruel.

One keeper, wiping her hands on trousers that smell faintly of goat, says something that stays with me, and it doesn’t sound like a press release at all.

We started with three hens and a dream, and somehow we ended up raising a village. We’ll find them all good homes. That’s the promise.

• Final open days: posted on the official website and at the gate, subject to capacity
• Donation and adoption pages: live until the last animal relocates
• Volunteer thank-you evening: date to be confirmed after the final weekend
• Relocation timeline: phased over 8–12 weeks with welfare checks at each stage

The small park that keeps a town warm

There’s a reason places like this feel stitched into a town’s jumper. They don’t shout. They host cub packs on rainy Thursdays, and let the Brownies plant bulbs by the hedgehog hospital, and quietly lend a generator when the village hall’s fails. On big nights the owls hoot through bonfire smoke; on school mornings the coach drivers know where to park by muscle memory. What looks like entertainment is actually civic glue. *You notice it only when a hole appears.*

Friends swap stories in the car park and the same themes come back: kindness at the café till, a baby’s first word being “duck”, the keeper who remembered a child’s name from months ago. Those things sound small until they’re gone. I keep thinking of the teenagers who got their first Saturday job here, and the retired engineer who mended the feed chute because he couldn’t not. A park like this teaches a town how to say hello. Losing it forces us to practise goodbye.

There’s also the fear that tomorrow will be all screens and malls, and that feels too neat, too flat. What replaces a pen full of goat shenanigans? A click? A reel? Maybe the next thing isn’t obvious yet. Maybe it’s a community garden with chickens and compost, or a travelling education van that pops up at fairs with a ferret and a story. The keepers aren’t retreating; they’re regrouping. **A place can close and still leave work to do.** The message on the chalkboard by the gate says it without fuss: “Thank you for 17 years.” The instant reply in people’s faces is simple too: **We’ll find a way.**

There’s a moment on the last afternoon when a young red kite arcs over the field and nobody talks. The timing is weirdly perfect, or maybe we make it so because we need it to be. Either way, you stand there feeling the soft noise of a crowd turning something ordinary into a marker, the memory you’ll carry in your pocket like a smooth stone. Share your story with the person next to you, take one more slow lap, and then let yourself leave. The town will bring its habits somewhere new; the animals will find safe beds; the keepers will wash their boots and start again. **It shouldn’t have to end like this** sits on the tongue, unspoken. The rest — what we build next, how we stay soft — is up to us.

FAQ :

• When does the park actually close?The final open days are posted on the official website and at the gate; the last week may operate with limited capacity.
• What happens to the animals?They’re moved to accredited zoos and sanctuaries via welfare-led plans, with vets and experienced transport teams on hand.
• Can I adopt or rehome an animal?No private rehoming. You can symbolically adopt or donate; exotic species need specialist care and legal permits.
• Will staff lose their jobs?Some roles end, some keepers transfer with animals, others move to partner facilities or education projects in the region.
• Is there any chance of a rescue or new site?Talks happen in the background, but nothing public yet; any future project would be announced by the current leadership.