Landmark savings at adventure park

What started as the first purpose-built visitor centre in Europe, featuring an auditorium, exhibition hall, restaurant, craft shop, nature trail and picnic park, has evolved into a key part of our area’s tourism economy, welcoming generations of families while also providing significant local employment.

Over the decades, we have continually evolved to keep our offer fresh and exciting, adding experiences such as the water coaster, our aerial net challenge and even a dinosaur experience. But as any business owner will know, the past few years have been challenging. Rising operating costs - particularly energy costs - have put enormous pressure on businesses throughout the country. For a business like ours, which relies on maintaining a safe environment and high-quality experience for our visitors, these challenges have been especially pronounced. We knew that work needed to be done to safeguard the business, which has become an icon of the area after half a century in operation.

Dinosaur experience at Landmark Forest Adventure Park Landmark Forest Adventure Park

That’s when we began a detailed analysis of our energy use, looking at how and where improvements could be made. Our goal was to safeguard the long-term future of the business while making our operations more environmentally sustainable. It was during this process that we learned about the Climate Adaptation Fund.

Since then, we’ve not only installed the new heat pump system but also carried out significant additional work. We replaced the roof on one of our main buildings, installed a much-improved control unit at the water coaster and renewed a large section of underground pipework to ensure the heating system performs as efficiently as possible. We’ve tried to ensure that local businesses benefit too. We were delighted to work with local company Green Flame, which carried out a two-phase air-source heat pump project and replaced all of our pipework.

The Climate Adaptation Fund has been instrumental in kick-starting this journey, and I believe we would not have been able to achieve this scale of change without it.