Roberts Park parkrun - event 242

On the 17th October 2026 I ran Roberts Park parkrun, which was the 242nd event held at the venue, my 308th parkrun and 219th different course I'd attended.

Another week and another tick in the Yorkshire and Humber parkrun region, just one week since the last that the ink was barely dry.

Accrington Stanley Vs Gillingham actually takes place in Lancashire and has we followed the usual template on our away day adventures we'd have stayed at the Premier Inn in Blackburn and ran at Hyndburn parkrun nearby.

But Steph's Uncle Gary and Auntie Ruth live 15 miles or so east of Accrington in-between Colne and Cowling, meters over the Lancashire border into North Yorkshire. We've stayed there previously and I did Pendle which takes place in Colne and is the nearest event to the house.

Once I had accepted the invite to stay over, I looked around at which parkruns were situated nearby and there were plenty of options to choose from. The problem was my arbitrary selection technique that opts to choose an event based on an event number that I'd not ran at before.

The closest 10 events all had event number clashes and so I had to keep travelling outwards to find a suitable candidate. Once I had found one, I had to consider the geography. It may well be close to the house as the crow flies, but to drive their across and around country lanes would take ages and imwas staying as a guest, not using them as a babysitter to look after Hayden for me in the morning.

Eventually I opted for Roberts Park, which is based in Shipley just outside of Bradford, 25 minutes drive from the house. It is possibly one of my most random parkrun choices as it wasn't selected on the merits of its course, or because it was the closest one to my own home that I'd not yet done.

In all my planning however there was one consideration that I hadn't made - the Friday night commute. I left Gravesend at 4:30 and didnt arrive at Gary and Ruths until 11:15, nearly 7 hours later.

That long drive virtually put me off of driving for life and I seriously considered staying in bed in the morning to recover from the ordeal. 

Being an isolated property on a hillside on the edge of the Yorkshire Moors, you can certainly see the appeal of why Gary and Ruth uprooted from Kent and moved. But wiping the ice off the windscreen and acknowledging a 2 degrees temperature warning on the dashboard wiped out those ideals.

Luckily it was a lot warmer by the time I had arrived at Roberts park and joined the first timers meeting where full Yorkshire was on view. Listening to first timers briefings around the countries parkrun venues is a full tour of our nations linguistic differences. In fact Gary and I had a related conversation later that day about how he can go to two towns, both five minutes drive away from the house and hear two completely different accents. Apparently there is a clearly defined difference between a Lancastrian talking and a person from Yorkshire.

Robert Park parkrun takes place in Saltaire, the World Heritage Site and was designed for Sir Titus Salt the Victorian industrialist and philanthropist. 

The parkrun consists of almost two laps and starts on the main promenade that runs through the middle of the park. In it's elevated position running east to west, with a bandstand and ornamental gardens on the right and views overlooking the cricket pitch and pavilion below.

The run starts at the entrance of the promenade and participants head west to the far end where they do a U-turn and come all the way back again. The route then drops downhill to the path that goes around the cricket pitch and passes the cafeteria which looked rather tempting even on the first lap.

From the other side of the cricket pitch the route leaves the main park area and takes a pathway that is more trail based, and not knowing the geography too well I assume is general recreational ground. 

The second part of the lap therefore takes place on this recreation ground, another out and back, but along two different paths as opposed to the earlier one which was on the same pathway.

The out part is bumpy and includes two mounds to navigate over, the second offering a choice of taking some stairs or the muddy side path - stairs won for me on both laps!

The return part is quite odd, as it doesn't feel like a parkrun at all, it feels more like a Wednesday afternoon wellbeing Hour run as it follows the path outside of a cul-de-sac of houses and feels.like your running down a street. Once last the houses you dip downhill slightly and back onto the recreation area where the path to the park is picked back up.

Entry back into the park is via an alleyway which is a short, sharp uphill which twists through a couple of 90 degree turns. Whilst the route out of the park was via a single-file gate and got incredibly congested, the pack had spread out considerably by this point and so much easier to navigate.

Once back in the park on the western side, you find yourself at the top of the park, which allows you to continue around the path in a clockwise route, for the first lap back around to the promenade where the lap is repeated. Or for the second lap a smaller path is taken which leads behind the bandstand to a rather lovely downhill finish.

I came home in 318th place out of a field of 486 in a time of 32:40.

As per the week before the attendance of the event was possibly too big for the route itself and so a couple of areas of the course where it wasn't possible to run, mostly on the first lap. I'm quite okay with that as it's not about the running for me but others may well find that off-putting.