Willow Pastures Country Park, Hull – Review
By Matt Callard, September 2026
For all that the East Yorkshire coast offers – beaches and big skies, nature reserves and seaside towns, quiet corners and unapologetic amusement arcades – choosing somewhere to stay can be surprisingly complicated, whatever your needs may be.
There are caravans by the thousand, enormous holiday cottages designed for three generations at once, campsites, hotels, apartments and resorts where almost every waking hour can be filled with organised entertainment.
Willow Pastures Country Park offers something subtly different. Set just outside Skirlaugh and around 20 minutes from Hornsea, it is neither a seaside resort nor quite a rural retreat. Instead, it occupies a useful middle ground: affordable, peaceful and practical, close enough to the coast for spontaneous trips to the beach but sufficiently removed from it to escape the noise and crowds when everybody has had enough.
From my West Yorkshire base, getting there was refreshingly straightforward. The M62 does most of the work before the route continues towards Hull and onwards into the East Riding. There are none of those increasingly narrow coastal roads that can make the final 20 minutes of a family journey feel like an extreme sport.
The arrival itself is unspectacular. There are no sweeping gates or theatrically landscaped driveways; the site is reached directly from the main road. But Willow Pastures quickly begins accumulating points where they matter.
Check-in was notably friendly and efficient, something that ought to be unremarkable in hospitality but isn’t always. Within minutes, the family felt welcomed rather than processed.
“Thoughtfulness”
There is also a free guest app, well worth downloading for the duration of a stay. Rather than existing merely because somebody decided that every business now requires an app, it is genuinely useful, bringing together information about the park, nearby attractions, maps and instructions for the equipment inside the lodge.
And the lodge itself proved to be a small triumph of organisation.
Nobody could reasonably describe it as enormous, yet very little space is wasted. The kitchen comes with cooker, microwave, fridge, freezer and washing machine, while cupboards and drawers reveal an unexpectedly comprehensive collection of pans, utensils and cooking equipment. Over four nights there was no moment when some obvious domestic implement turned out to be missing.
Even the less glamorous necessities have somewhere to live. The vacuum cleaner disappears neatly away. So does the ironing board. Storage has been squeezed into corners without making the place resemble a puzzle box.
This careful planning extends to the welcome pack. Children receive activities connected to the park’s Little Willows programme, including a nature trail and brass rubbings to discover around the grounds. For adults, perhaps less excitingly, there is an extremely useful collection of practical supplies: dishwasher tablets, washing-up liquid, cloths, a tea towel, sugar and milk among them.
Some of these had already travelled from home in the family car, but their inclusion demonstrates the sort of thoughtfulness that makes self-catering markedly easier. The best hospitality is sometimes less about champagne on arrival than discovering somebody remembered that kids spill things and adults need to clean it up.
“Quiet atmosphere”
The living area has two sofas, and after a day out there is enough room for a family to collapse in front of the television without feeling compressed. The two bedrooms are similarly neat, clean and comfortable. The main bedroom has a good-sized en suite and an impressively powerful shower; the children’s room contains two single beds and ample clothes storage. Its separate shower room is tighter, but perfectly functional.
And then there is the hot tub.
For the children, this was less an amenity than a proposed alternative address. Given the choice, they might happily have spent four days gently poaching themselves in it. For adults it comes into its own later, when the East Yorkshire air has cooled and the day’s sand, chips, driving and negotiations over arcade machines can be allowed to dissolve into bubbles.
Privacy varies, however. Lodges sit reasonably close together and some hot tubs are more screened than others. Families in neighbouring accommodation could occasionally be heard, although never intrusively. Willow Pastures makes much of its quiet atmosphere and operates a no-noise policy after 9pm. But if you’re the kind of guest who wishes to keep your bubbles private it would be wise to check before booking if your tub is hidden.
Willow Pastures doesn’t claim to be a holiday park in the traditional all-action sense. There is no entertainment complex attempting to exhaust children before bedtime. It functions as a calm base from which to explore.
Hornsea (20 mins) made the strongest case for that strategy. Remember when it used to be Yorkshire’s ‘hidden gem’? Well, the town felt noticeably busier than on previous visits, its popularity perhaps catching up with what residents have known for years. Yet there remained plenty of room on the beach, food was easy to find (if lacking quality) and the resort still retains an agreeably manageable scale.
“Unexpecterd star”
There is more here than a quick paddle, though. Hornsea has a broad promenade, its Blue Flag beach, the town centre and, slightly inland, Hornsea Mere, Yorkshire’s largest freshwater lake. But, for us, the simplest pleasures proved enough: sand, sea air, a stroll and something to eat without turning the day into something military.
On day two, a trip in the opposite direction took the family to The Deep in Hull (25 mins), still one of the region’s most ambitious family attractions. Architecturally, it remains spectacular, jutting towards the Humber like something that has surfaced from beneath it, and the vast tanks can still deliver that sudden hush which descends when a shark glides past or even overhead.
On this visit, however, The Deep was heaving. Viewing areas became competitive and several interactive features were broken or tired. Perhaps arriving at the end of the school holidays did it few favours, but there was a sense that parts of the visitor experience could now use the same attention lavished on the animals themselves. Frustrated children and crowded exhibits are not ideal companions.
Bridlington (40 mins) on day three, meanwhile, delivered Bridlington.
There were arcades, beach fun, flashing lights, machines designed to convert pound coins into paper tickets and some thoroughly mediocre seaside food. None of which is necessarily a criticism. Bridlington has long understood its role and performs it with gusto.
The unexpected star was the traditional doughnut-making machine, a glorious little production line in which loops of dough travelled through hot oil before emerging ready for sugar. It held the children’s attention with considerably greater efficiency than some attractions costing actual admission money. I had to literally pull them away.
There is, admittedly, far more to Bridlington than this – two sizeable beaches, the harbour, the Old Town, Sewerby Hall and the coastline towards Flamborough – and a better-planned visit might have revealed a different town. Sometimes a family day at the seaside simply follows its own gravitational pull towards sand, arcades and fried carbohydrates.
“Understated”
Back at Willow Pastures, there is a small shop for essentials, though guests should note that it is not permanently open, and the neighbouring Gardener’s Country Inn provides a useful option when nobody wants to cook. It has a small children’s play area and we were served decent, if unspectacular, pub food. Willow Pastures even has a spa on site, should the adults fancy dipping their toes into indulgence.
One minor accident during the stay exposed perhaps the only practical gap. There was no first-aid kit in the lodge and, with staff not on site in the evening, a supermarket pharmacy run became necessary. Including a small basic kit – plasters, wipes and similar essentials – would seem a sensible addition to accommodation aimed partly at families.
But such criticisms sit around the edges of an experience that gets the important things right.
Willow Pastures does not attempt to compete with the East Coast’s enormous caravan parks, nor should it. Its strengths are more understated: cleanliness, convenience, thoughtful equipment, genuinely friendly service and the ability to return from the clamour of a seaside day to somewhere where very little is happening.
That last quality may be its greatest advantage.
If Willow Pastures can retain and refine those three essentials – convenience, cleanliness and friendliness – it has every chance of becoming the kind of East Yorkshire escape that families and couples return to repeatedly: close to everything, yet pleasantly removed from almost all of it.
Willow Pastures Country Park, Hull Road, Skirlaugh, East Yorkshire, HU11 5AE
Website: www.willowpastures.co.uk
Telephone: 01964 598303
Email: reception@willowpastures.co.uk
Lodges: From £95 per night, depending on lodge type and time of year.
All lodges have private hot tubs, with a selection of dog-friendly lodges available.
Little Willows: Children’s activities designed around exploring and enjoying the countryside, with explorer passports, scavenger hunts and plenty of little adventures along the way.
Reyt Good Spa Retreat: A private spa experience with sauna, hot tub, cold plunge and outdoor shower.
