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Car park improvements

Works to improve car parks

See our news page for the latest information on car park improvement works. Note that we have altered our way of working to try and ensure that complete closures are kept to a minimum, although this is sometimes unavoidable. Note that when works are undergoing, the car park being worked on is not suitable for use by events or large groups - you must contact us if planning an event with multiple people that would utilise one of our car parks.

Following our public engagement exercise on visitor facilities in the Pentland Hills, we are moving forward with improving car parks in the Regional Park in the near future.

The City of Edinburgh Council and Midlothian Council have approved four planning applications, for Certificates of Lawfulness for Threipmuir, Flotterstone and Bonaly car parks, and Planning Consent for Harlaw car park. These applications were submitted as a requirement of the successful £772,620 funding from Visit Scotland's Rural Tourism Infrastructure Fund, part of a project costing circa £1 million. 

You can view our Joint Committee discussion on improvement of visitor facilities (Weds 20 Jan 2021). You can also view a later Joint Committee meeting with an updated presentation on proposals by the Project Centre (Thurs 27 Jan 2022). 

Some of the measures outlined below and on the following pages are as a result of issues raised in the Pentland Hills Visitor Management Plan (direct link to PDF download).

Once stage 1 at Bonaly has completed, the proposed timetable is for construction to then focus on Threipmuir car park (September - November 2023 (plus further work carried out early 2024), Bonaly (November - December 2023), Harlaw (December 2023 - March 2024), and Flotterstone car park (February - May 2024). There will also be further work during 2024 on the access road to Harlaw which will necessitate a complete closure. Please note that due to operational reasons this timetable may change; we will update our news section with the latest information as soon as we have it. During these times these car parks will have limited public access or will be closed if required.We thank you for your understanding and support in the delivery of improved visitor infrastructure in the Pentland Hills Regional Park.

We look forward to having additional car parking spaces, better surfaces and delination of spaces, and facilities such as toilets and bike repair stations. As part of the refurbishments we will be introducing pay machines at all four car parks. It is intended that income from these machines will be dedicated to running a Regional Park service with more capacity to deploy rangers where needed and a better ability to maintain infrastructure such as paths, signposts and pedestrian gates.

View designs here.