Dog-friendly Rotherham

A community pub on Badsley Moor Lane in east Rotherham, ten minutes' walk from the top end of Clifton Park. Craft Union lists it as a dog friendly pub, with water bowls kept for visiting dogs, a beer garden and food served. There are DJ and karaoke nights and the full run of live sport. It is the nearest dog-friendly pub to Clifton Park, which matters because the park is the one place in the borough with a designated off-lead area.

A Cask Marque pub at 111 Wickersley Road on the eastern edge of Rotherham, between the town and Wickersley. Craft Union lists it as a dog friendly pub, and it is one of the few in the group with real ale on properly, alongside a dartboard, sports screens, an outside area and its own car park. There is an accessible toilet. Clifton Park is a mile and a half west and Ulley Country Park about four miles south.

A carvery pub on Stadium Way at Parkgate, on the retail park north of Rotherham town centre and a few minutes from the AESSEAL New York Stadium. Greene King lists it as dog friendly on the pub's own facilities panel, alongside a beer garden, a car park and a Wacky Warehouse indoor play barn. It is family-led rather than a quiet drinker's pub, so expect noise, but it has the parking and the space that most town centre pubs do not. Open from 11am, food served to 9pm.

An estate pub on Woodlaithes Road on the eastern edge of Rotherham between Wickersley and Ravenfield, with a car park and a beer garden. The pub says dogs are welcome in the bar area, and keeps water bowls and treats for them; the dining side is not offered. It is about two miles from Thrybergh Country Park and three from Ulley, so it works as the stop at the end of a reservoir circuit rather than a destination in itself.

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.

A hotel on West Bawtry Road just off junction 33 of the M1, on the southern edge of Rotherham above the Don valley. It keeps a set of rooms specifically for guests with dogs at fifteen pounds per dog per night, and will put food bowls and waste bags in the room if you tell reception before you arrive. Dogs may use designated areas around the hotel including the open lobby, where there is table service, but they cannot come into every dining area and must stay in the room if you eat elsewhere. Ulley Country Park and Canklow Woods are both within four miles.