Lochore Meadows

Sarah Muirhead

17 December 2025

An astonishing 16 people signed up for our all ability Christmas walk at Lochore Meadows Country Park on Wednesday 17th December.

We had five call-offs and two call-ins so a record breaking 13 people turned up at the Willie Clarke Centre at the appointed time.

There was a lot of concern about the possibility of wet weather but for most of us the lure of soup and scones at the end of the walk was enough encouragement

The final line up was Crawford & Moira, Jan & Graham, Alastair & Isabel, Willie, Andrew, Denise, Pamela Siebert, Pam Harrington, Judith, Cosmo and me.

Before we started walking we decided not to stop except to regroup and, actually, there isn’t much to say about the walk itself. We went clockwise round the loch, on a very good path, keeping as close to the water as we reasonably could.

A red squirrel crossed our path quite early on, but most wildlife would have been deterred by the amount of chat.

When we reached the decision point Alastair and Isabel decided the scones were calling and took the direct route back to the cafe. The rest of us went up through the beech trees and over Harran Hill. At a mere 190m it is not to be confused with Benarty Hill at 356m, which lies between Lochore and the RSPB centre at Loch Leven and would make a fine summer walk.

Our route took us along Ladath Stripe, a strip of woodland on the south side of Kildownies Hill, and then down through a muddy field to the industrial heritage area of the country park. The men showed some interest in the mining equipment but the rain had started and we were anxious not to get too wet.

The soup and scones were excellent, and a fitting end to our walking year. Many thanks to Crawford and others who organise and lead the walks.

Your brief history lesson is as follows.

Willie Clarke, after whom the visitor centre is named, was a Fife councillor for over 40 years and a passionate champion of Lochore Meadows. The country park extends to over 1200 acres and opened in 1976. There was originally an island fortress in Loch Ore called Lochore Castle, established by Robert the Burgundian around 1128, and there is evidence of a crannog before that. In 1790 the landowner, Captain Park, drained the loch but it remained boggy and refilled due to mining subsidence. In the early 20th century the area was central to Fife’s coalfields and the Mary Pit was Scotland’s deepest. The last mine closed in 1966, followed by a large scale reclamation project, which I think was the most ambitious in Europe. The former mining areas were flooded and over 1 million trees were planted before the country park opened to the public.