Castleshaw Centre

What will students see and do?

Castleshaw Centre is an activity centre that welcomes around 10,000 visitors each year. It offers residential stays, full-day visits and half-day trips where participants can take part in problem-solving courses and challenging adventure-based activities.

The wide range of activities at Castleshaw Centre includes ghyll scrambling, tower climbing, high ropes, artificial caving, mountain biking, orienteering, hill walking, rock climbing, flatwater kayaking, sit on top kayaking, white water kayaking, canoeing, archery, rafted canoeing, raft building and abseiling.

These activities are intended to push participants’ limits and encourage team bonding, and they can form the main basis of your visit or simply be incorporated into your own programme of activities.

The site is also surrounded by a network of lanes, footpaths and bridleways with excellent public access, and just a short distance from the remains of the Castleshaw Roman Fort. There are information boards at the fort but you can get further details for self-led tours via the Friends of Castleshaw Roman Forts website.

If that’s not enough, there’s the nearby Castleshaw Quest, an adventure walk aimed at younger participants that takes in the area around the lower Castleshaw reservoir.

How does the trip link to the curriculum?

Castleshaw Centre places emphasis on activities that are both fun and educational. It offers a range of programmes that encourage cooperative and collaborative behaviour, usually taking the form of a half-day of team games followed by a half-day of activities linked to curriculum targets, such as mapwork or habitat investigating.

The activities included in these programmes can vary from group-based initiative tests to traversing a high ropes course, but the focus will always be to plan and execute a series of group tasks, with a review and suggestions for improvement discussed between each task.

Depending on your learning aims, your programme may be guided towards particular curriculum areas. For instance, the activities work especially well with PSHE, as the tasks address personal action planning, emotional wellbeing, healthy lifestyles, relationships, behaviour and practices in the workplace, and personal safety.

For a more history-focused trip, students can investigate the valley’s archaeological timeline that spans the Victorian era, the Industrial Revolution, the middle ages, the Romans and the Bronze Age.

Alternatively, a geography-based trip can look at the presence of glaciated valleys, moorland habitats, the source of the major river and examples of settlements shaped by the local landscape.

Subjects covered