A family-run estate pub on Forest Rise in Balby, on the south-west side of Doncaster, refurbished in 2023 and taken on in 2024 by licensees who previously ran pubs around Leeds. There is a garden, its own car park, darts and pool, a function room, and a busy diary of bingo, quizzes and Saturday karaoke, so a dog is better here on a quiet weekday than on a disco night. The green wedge and playing fields around Balby are on the doorstep, with Cusworth Hall park a short drive north. CAMRA's WhatPub entry lists the pub as dog friendly with no room excluded; the pub does not publish a policy of its own.
These are the parts only the business can add. We check the dog policy and stamp the date — photos, prices and their own words are theirs to put in, and this listing is waiting for them.
The fire, the snug, the water bowl by the door.
A few dishes and what they cost, so people arrive knowing.
Can the dog actually sleep here, and what does it cost.
Which rooms, which times, whether the whippet gets a biscuit.
Claiming fills every box above, and lets you reply to reviews when they open. £15 a month, no contract, and it never changes the verdict — the stamp stays ours.
Twenty hectares of plantation in the parish of Cantley-with-Branton, laid out around two hundred years ago as private hunting woodland on a seven thousand acre estate and closed to the public for most of its life. The Forestry Commission took it on in 1953 for timber and still kept people out; the council bought it in 1994 and opened it for the first time. Timber production continues alongside conservation work, so expect forestry rides, stacked logs and the occasional closed compartment rather than a manicured park. It is council open space under the Doncaster PSPO with no lake and no livestock, so no standing lead requirement, and it is quiet enough that you will often have the whole wood to yourself.
The council's own three and a half mile trail from Cantley Park north through the edge of the housing and into Sandall Beat Wood, which links the two biggest green spaces on the east side of Doncaster in one go. Cantley Park itself has woodland, a pond, a pitch and putt course that costs nothing if you bring your own clubs, and a skate park; the trail leaves it and works north across Sandall Beat Road into the wood. Under the Doncaster PSPO the lead goes on for the footpath round the Cantley Park pond and dogs stay out of the fenced play areas, but the rest is open. There is parking at Cantley Park itself, which Sandall Beat's own small car park often lacks by mid-morning at a weekend.
Eighteenth-century landscaped parkland below a Grade I hall two miles north-west of Doncaster city centre, with a chain of ornamental lakes in the valley and long grass slopes above them. The council's own page for the park names walks with the dog as one of the things it is for, and the parkland is open every day of the year even when the museum is shut. Under Doncaster's dog control PSPO the lead comes on for the footpaths that run round the lakes, and dogs must stay out of the fenced children's play areas; the open grass between the hall and the lakes is off lead. Parking is card or contactless only after repeated thefts from the machines, from £1.20 for an hour up to £7.00 over four hours, and the barrier locks at 9pm.
Nobody has written one for The Spinney. If you have been with the dog, you would be the first — and the first review is the one everybody reads.
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