Town Wood

Town Wood is a proper woodland walk on the outskirts of Stoke-on-Trent, the kind of place locals know about but visitors often miss. It's not vast - you can work your way through the trees in an afternoon without breaking a sweat - but it's a genuine escape from the industrial grime that characterises the town itself. The paths wind through mixed woodland with decent tree cover, and there are enough trails to let you choose your own loop rather than trudging the same route everyone else takes.

This is ideal if you're camping at Avona Escapes or Castle Camping nearby and need a proper walk without driving an hour for moorland. Families with kids aged six upwards will get genuine enjoyment from it; younger ones might find the terrain a bit samey after forty minutes. Walkers serious about distance should probably look elsewhere, but if you want a bracing hour-long ramble between campsites, it delivers.

The wood itself is unremarkable in the way many English forests are - no dramatic gorges or rare birds - but that's rather the point. It's green, it's quiet, and it breaks up the Potteries landscape convincingly. Free to enter, naturally, and you can access it pretty much whenever you fancy. Allow ninety minutes if you're taking photos and pottering about; an hour if you just want to stretch your legs. The fact that it's genuinely close to town means you won't waste half a day on travel, which matters when you're on a week's camping holiday.