Dog-friendly walks in Rotherham

Boston Park is Rotherham's first public park, just over eight hectares on the hill at the end of Boston Castle Grove off Moorgate, opened on 4 July 1876 to mark the centenary of American independence. The castle at the top is a hunting lodge of 1775 built for the Earl of Effingham and named for the Boston Tea Party, and it opens Tuesday, Wednesday, Saturday and Sunday from 11am to 3pm between April and September. The walk drops south out of the formal gardens into Canklow Woods, an ancient woodland of oak and birch on the valley side above the Rother, and climbs back up the far side. The park paths are surfaced; the woodland tracks are earth and get churned in winter.

Four and a half hectares of ponds, wetland and wildflower meadow bank beside the River Don on Sheffield Road, built on the site of the Seven Sisters steel foundry and doubling as part of Rotherham's flood alleviation scheme. Sheffield and Rotherham Wildlife Trust permits dogs but requires them to be kept on a lead. Twenty-three butterfly species have been recorded here along with damselflies and dragonflies, which is why the lead rule exists on a site this small. It is a short, flat, entirely urban circuit sandwiched between the A6178 and the river, useful as a leg-stretch rather than a day out.

Rotherham's main town park, a Victorian layout of avenues, bandstand lawns and mature limes on the rise between Clifton Lane and the town centre, with the museum in the old Clifton House at the top. This is the one place in the borough with a formally designated off-lead area, marked in blue on the park's own map, and it is also the one place where being off lead anywhere else will cost you money. Dogs are barred from the Watersplash water play area entirely and must be on a lead around the children's play areas, and only assistance dogs go inside the museum. Paths are tarmac and gently graded, so it walks in any weather, and there are waste bins right through the park.