Haigh Hall High Ropes
16 Aug 2025 · Haigh Hall · High Ropes · Lancashire
About 15 minutes away from home we've got Haigh Hall. It's an old country house built between 1827 & 1840 for James Lindsay the 7th Earl of Balcarres. It was purchased by Wigan Council in 1947. The hall and surrounding parkland and woods (around 250 acres) forms Haigh Country Park AKA Haigh Woodland Park.
Back in the day the site was mined having a seam of coal Cannel as well as the usual stuff. Cannel coal comes from spores, waxes, and cutaneous and corky materials of terrestrial vascular plants, in part from Lycopsid (scale tree). Cannel coal accumulated in ponds and shallow lakes in peat-forming swamps and bogs of the Carboniferous age under oxygen-deficient conditions. Cannel coal seams are shallow and often found above other deposits, the coal itself, being rich in oils, burns long, with a bright yellow flame and little ash.
In England a member of the Bradshaigh family discovered a plentiful shallow seam of smooth, hard, cannel coal on his estate, in Haigh, Lancashire in the 16th century. The shallow depth at which it was found meant it was suitable for the simple surface mining methods available at that time. It could be worked and carved, and was prized for fireplaces as an excellent fuel that burned with a bright flame, was easily lit, and left virtually no ash…
Haigh High Ropes
The high ropes course was built in 2016 as an early phase of the renovations of the park. There's 11 obstacles to get round on the course. There's two courses, the high ropes and the low ropes. It takes about 45 mins to get geared up and round. You've got to be at least 8 and 120 cm to go on the high ropes.
You climb up a few flights of stairs to the start of the course. When you get clipped on, you head out of the gate onto the first obstacle, a tightrope.
As you walk between the obstacles you swing your safety line round the pole over a steel runner. The next is a zig zag plank walk with no hand rope.
Only one person is allowed on each obstacle at a time… The next obstacle is a swinging plank walk.
When you clear the swinging planks you get to the zipline. When you reach the end there's a climbing net you need to grab onto and climb up to the next obstacle. When you get confident, you can just leap off the perch and zoom down the line.
When you climb up the net and onto the perch the next obstacle is a set of swinging poles…
Thoughts
The high ropes course is a great activity, plenty thrills for adventurous youngsters, teens and adults. There's a range of activities. The staff who run the area are well kitted out and trained. They've got well used processes for every eventuality on the course. Lost a shoe? No worry, they'll tie it to a rope and bring it up to you. Miss the cargo net and find yourself in the middle of a zip line, no problem, they'll bring a pole out do some rope shenanigans and you can pull yourself back to the net.
You need to be physically able to do the course, it's quite high off the ground, so if you don't like heights then this is probably not for you. Book in advance, it’s ~£15 for a lap. If you can, book onto the last session of the day. We've been a couple of times and got two laps both times
