Camelot theme park is a small park in the North West between J27 & J28 of the M6 near Chorley. The park is a little less known amongst its family theme park rivals such as Lightwater Valley and Flamingo Land, but did make news headlines in 2008 when it was announced the park was to go into liquidation. Thankfully, after Knights Leisure Ltd took over it was confirmed that the park would open for the 2009 season, though due to delays in takeover the season didn’t start for the park until the end of May 2009.

Camelot were not able to give definitive average gate figures to us, since the park has not yet run for a complete season (since reforming) but the park did manage to tell us that they currently employ 15 permanent staff and 150 season staff.  The chairman Roy Page has confirmed that Camelot Theme Park’s future is now secure financially and UK Park News was delighted to hear this.

The Camelot website (www.camelotthemepark.co.uk) manages to rank almost as high in Google searches (searching “UK Theme Parks”) as its rival small parks, featuring at the top of page two, which considering the size of the park is still an achievement. We’d like to see though, as the park grows under Knights Leisure, the website rankings increase so the site lands on the first page of Google results. 

The website itself, whilst it serves its purpose to some extent, certainly seems to be lacking in a few areas. There appears to be no park map in any format – we’re pretty sure the site used to have this pre-2009 but unless we’re very much mistaken, we couldn’t locate a map on the site anywhere, which should be a basic provision for any theme park website.

While the rest of the site is functional and provides the majority of the information required, it appears to be a little less user friendly or easy on the eye to its small park rivals. Many sites these days are very clean or fresh to view, which is something that the Camelot could improve in.

There is a video trailer for the rides at Camelot though and we were massively impressed with the whole production. If you haven’t seen it, it features Knightmare with an excellent and very dramatic soundtrack – the best in-web production video we’ve seen in our opinion; better than the videos for the larger corporate parks. Well done Camelot.

Pros:
- Lots of easily accessible information about the park.
- Photos for all major attractions.

Cons:
- No park map available.
- Site uses in-frames making it a bit difficult to navigate around.
- Feels overall like the site needs a revamp.

Gate Prices (as of July 2010):

After searching online, we found only 1 special offer in association with Money Supermarket which has a 2 for 1 offer available until September 2010 when paying the full gate price.
We find the gate price of £22 per person to be a little on the expensive side when buying single tickets. Although if tickets are bought online, you can save £4 per ticket, the best value tickets are the family savers, when purchased its the equivalent of £15.50 per person which seems much better value for money, especially for a family day out.

The Park has no major new attractions for 2010, though considering it almost went into liquidation in 2008/2009 this is perhaps hardly surprising. The main attractions are:

Knightmare – a custom Swarzkopf coaster. This is quite a unique attraction, that’s extremely smooth apart from the odd bumpy corner and its great fun. It looks rather odd due to its layout and structural design, but this is probably due to how the ride was when heavily themed during its time as "BMRX" in Japan.  We loved this coaster – it’s a great addition to the park, the only problem for us was the somewhat annoying and very loud claxon that sounds every time a train is dispatched!

Whirlwind – a travelling spinning coaster ala Sonic Spinball. Unfortunately this ride was closed during our visit due to a technical fault with the lift hill motor, and neither I nor Matt (our Research & News Editor) had previously been on this. Understandably in this industry technical faults are all too common, so we moved on to the next attraction without feeling too disheartened. One thing we did notice though after getting back home and researching the ride on rcdb.com was how much it appeared that the ride has been neglected. From the photos on RCDB it looks very impressive, but the attraction is in desperate need of a re-spray as can be seen in the photos below.

Excalibur 2 – Well, show us a flat Spin ‘n’ Spew and UK Park News will be there in a flash. As ever we were keen to try this odd looking flat ride. We first watched it on a few cycles and both Matt and I looked at each other and agreed that it was most likely going to be a painful and unpleasant experience, so we joined the queue.

Surprisingly, Excalibur 2 is in fact far from uncomfortable, you might think of Submission or Ripsaw at Alton Towers as a comparable experience, when in fact the ride is very comfortable and extremely good fun and not nauseating by any means. We loved it.

Excalibur 2 Movie

Dragon Flyer – A diesel powered coaster. We were taken aback by this attraction instantly. Of course UKPN knew that diesel coasters exist, but for one reason or another we had completely overlooked this at Camelot until we saw (and heard) it fly by for the first time! We were instantly excited and very much looked forward to our first “flight”.

Whilst the layout of the coater itself is rather rudimentary, it is just immense fun on all levels. The track circumnavigates the bottom half of the park which carries its own charm – watching the attractions and people whizz by while picking up the faint smell of burning diesel, for us was just magical. Top marks for this attraction Camelot.

The park is littered with a number of other attractions, all of which are aimed mainly at the younger audience including a Big Apple coaster, a single drop log flume, water slide, balloon race, ghost train and others.

The park does have a dedicated “kiddies” ride section though, which is very nice to see. We were on park with my 3 year old daughter and although she is not a ride fan just now, this area catered for all those under the age of about 6 or 7. It consists of some merry go rounds, baby pirate ship and other small attractions along with an indoor soft play/adventure area for those kids who don’t enjoy the rides.

Overall, it’s a nice mix of rides that the park offers, not forgetting the excellent petting zoo which is a winner with the kids, though it’s obvious this park is aimed more at the family/children’s market. We wouldn’t say the park is craving for a big new signature coaster, but it’d be very nice to see Whirlwind receive a new paint job.

Throughout the park there are your usual burger/hot dog stalls however, we spotted the food court on the map that we had been handed by a member of staff, and headed for that.
The food court consists of a large marquee style structure with plenty of indoor seating, which is great for all weather types. Often we see mass outdoor eating areas which become redundant during the typical English poor weather days.

There are a variety of food offerings including pizza and fish and chips – we settled for a Wimpy which was reasonably priced and came with a very generous portion of chips. There are kids meals available and family meal deals:

Kids Menu – from £3.70
Adult menu – from £5
Meal deal for 4 - £20

We also noticed that the park has an excellent number of “Pay & Play” side stall games. We don’t usually bother with these in parks, but it was good to see Camelot have made the effort to include lots of fun games for guests to try. One thing we did find quite disappointing was the distinct lack of on ride photo availability. Even on the larger rides such as Knightmare there wasn’t the opportunity to purchase a photo which we think would be a fantastic revenue stream for the park. We could only see on ride photos available from the water slide.

There’s a number of shops dotted around the park, mainly selling generic merchandise, but due to the theme of the park, perhaps this is more successful than others with swords, shields and other Knights wear available – something that the kids just love.

Overall, the food/retail sections of the park is above average, with food being well priced and of pretty good quality (where we ate) my only personal gripe would be that I wanted to get a hotdog around 4pm near the Jousting Arena, but they’d already closed up for the day.

Generally, the whole experience on park was positive with almost all staff members being pleasant both towards us, and towards other guests. Our front of house lady upon arrival was very pleasant when we arrived for the Knight School event (detailed below) but there was a slight misunderstanding over the diary entry for our attendance, and while the lady at the desk was very nice about it, her colleague didn’t seem happy/friendly about the proceedings, which left us feeling a little awkward.

Upon leaving the park, all the Knights of Camelot were waiting at the park exit to say goodbye to kids and families, and to allow people to take photos with them. This is an excellent touch – you can see that kids love the Knight Themeing and this is a fantastic way for a family to end their day.

Camelot is a family orientated park, with a nice balance between family fun and thrills/spills. There’s some good rides for those adrenaline junkies, mixed with a variety of family rides, and an excellent kiddies area, which we were very impressed with.

The atmosphere in the park was pleasant with no loud/boisterous teenagers or the sight of trouble anywhere. UK Park News was particularly impressed with the parks wet weather promise. If it rains continually for at least 2 hours, the park offer to refund half the ticket cost – something we’ve never seen before in a park. During our questions to the park, they had mentioned that the weather had hampered gate figures in 2009, so perhaps this is a good way to ensure regular visitors during poor weather. Another area that stood out for us was the park's queue jumping policy. We're aware that all parks have a policy to remove queue jumpers from the park, but at Camelot the signs for this were frequent and very blatant, which is good to see.

UK Park News originally planned to attend to cover the Knight School Event, but this then extended into a full park review. Knight School is an event held every year by the park and its becoming becoming increasingly popular.

In 2010 35 children (aged 6-11) came along with their families to the special event. These people had won complimentary tickets and access to Knight School by previously taking part in a competition on the Camelot Website. Families were welcomed in reception between 09:30-10:00 and the children were given a name badge and split into 3 groups. Once the majority of families had arrived, we were taken down the Jousting Area. This is a large arena where the park has Live Jousting each day as part of their Camelot Themeing experience.

Once all had been accounted for, and despite the poor weather with it drizzling quite persistently, the event started officially with an announcement from King Arthur and his Good Knights. There were a number of Knights including Sir Lancelot and Sir Percival and not forgetting the Black Knight!

With the children split into 3 groups, the activities began – this included activities from the Camelot era, which was both very educational and great fun for the kids involved (and some of the parents!)

These activities included:

Sword Fighting (demonstrated with real swords/axes by the Knights) the kids were given foam swords.
Juggling with balls and batons.
How to dress a Horse, and familiarisation with battle wear.

Each group had around 15 minutes on each activity, and were rotated each time King Arthur made his announcement. We spent a lot of our time around the Horse Dressing activity which was extremely informative as the Good Knights explained what each item on the horse was used for. They also had a few sets of chainmail which the Knight’s used when in battle – they explained just how heavy the garment was, and how difficult it was to manoeuvre whilst wearing it. This was confirmed when some of the children were able to wear a piece and then attempt to run across the arena!

The event concluded by the participants receiving their Knighthood and free juggling balls/foam swords. We were very impressed with the whole event and we’d like to see this return next year, as I’m sure would the young children that attended!

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Conclusion
Our visit to Camelot was great fun and we agreed that the park definitely had a very good atmosphere that was almost “magical”. The park offers a great family day out with some excellent rides and attractions including some unique activities such as Jousting and Knight School – a real selling point for the park.

We love Camelot Theme Park and we hope to see the park continue to grow and become more established. For the 2010 season, we award the park a UK Park News Rating of 7/10.

All Article Photographs