Attraction in Lancashire

Blackpool Pleasure Beach is the most visited theme park in Britain and one of the most visited in Europe, an amusement park of 42 acres on the South Shore of Blackpool that has been operating continuously since 1896 and contains one of the finest collections of historic rides and rollercoasters in the world alongside modern attractions of the highest technical specification. The park has never lost the democratic, populist character of its Victorian and Edwardian origins, remaining genuinely accessible and genuinely thrilling across its entire range and maintaining the tradition of the seaside pleasure ground that has been a cornerstone of British working-class leisure since the late nineteenth century. The historic rides at Pleasure Beach are among the most significant surviving examples of early twentieth-century fairground engineering anywhere in the world. The Big Dipper of 1923 and the Grand National of 1935 are wooden roller coasters of the classic American style that provided the template for virtually all subsequent coaster design, and their preservation in operational condition while continuing to provide genuine thrills for modern riders represents an achievement of considerable engineering and conservation significance. The Big One, when it opened in 1994 as the tallest roller coaster in the world, represented the modern continuation of this tradition of headline-grabbing attraction building. The Ice Arena at Pleasure Beach has been producing ice shows of professional quality since the 1930s, a tradition that places it in a different category from most amusement parks and reflects Blackpool's broader ambition to provide entertainment of theatrical quality alongside its fairground attractions. The indoor rides and attractions provide options for days when the notoriously unpredictable Blackpool weather makes outdoor visiting uncomfortable. Blackpool as a resort has reinvented itself several times since its Victorian peak and continues to attract millions of visitors annually, with the Pleasure Beach forming the centrepiece of an evening economy based in no small part on the famous Illuminations that transform the resort each autumn.

White Scar Cave near Ingleton in the Yorkshire Dales is the longest show cave in Britain, a system of limestone caverns extending over a kilometre into the Great Scar Limestone beneath the slopes of Ingleborough that provides one of the most varied and most spectacular underground experiences available in the British Isles. The guided tour takes visitors through a sequence of passages, caverns and formations whose variety of scale and character includes the enormous Battlefield Cavern, one of the largest cave chambers in Britain, discovered only in 1990. The cave was discovered in 1923 by Cambridge student Christopher Long who explored it by candlelight and subsequently developed it as a show cave, opening it to visitors in 1925. The original passages explored by Long are characterised by the Rough Stream, an underground river whose course must be followed for part of the route, and the cave retains the character of an active cave system in which water continues to shape the geology and the formations. The Battlefield Cavern, 100 metres long and 30 metres high with the ceiling covered in calcite straw formations, is the visual highlight of the cave and one of the most impressive cave chambers in Britain. The stalactites and stalagmites of various passages, some of considerable scale, demonstrate the full range of speleothem formation types developed over the hundreds of thousands of years of the cave's history. The location of White Scar Cave at the foot of Ingleborough, with the Three Peaks walk passing nearby, makes it an excellent destination combined with the walking available in this section of the Dales.