Wales is an excellent place for a day out and people who actually take the time to write on TripAdvisor seem to think so, rating Cardiff as the third best place in the UK for a day out and two of the city's parks and one free attraction fare well too.
Cardiff's St Fagans National Museum of History was placed in the top 10 for Best Free Attractions on the tourist ratings site, while the capital's Bute Park and Roath Park made their way into the top 10 for Best Parks in the UK. The Welsh capital city itself was ranked third overall as the UK's Best Day Out in the research, which was conducted by online bingo site tombola, which analysed 1,393,370 Tripadvisor reviews in 20 of the UK’s most popular destinations.
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It looked at the total number of reviews mentioning the following words at each city's top-rated parks, free attractions and restaurants to score each location and create an index sharing the ultimate day out: 'Scenic', 'lovely walk', 'green space', 'well worth a visit', 'Sunday lunch', 'Sunday dinner', and 'fish and chips'.
According to the data analysed, Cardiff takes third place for the best day out overall. As one of the top three, it’s no surprise that Cardiff is one of the top locations for the best park. 20% of the total reviews state that the two parks reviewed (Roath Park and Bute Park) are ‘scenic’ and offer a ‘lovely walk’ and ‘green space’. They placed fifth and sixth respectively in the TripAdvisor review research.
Bute Park is in the city centre and includes an Arboretum. Found next to Cardiff Castle, the grounds of Bute Park were gifted to the people of the city by the Marquess of Bute in 1947 and turned into a public park in 1949. Nowadays it's a place for walks, lazing by the river, checking out the famous animal sculpture wall, or grabbing a coffee or cake and snack at the Pettigrew Tearooms or the Secret Garden Cafe. Over in the suburb of Roath is Roath Park. A Grade 1 listed historic park, Roath Park has a lake, recreation ground, botanic garden and more. It opened in 1894 and was one of the city's first public parks.
St Fagans is a great day out for families and it also has free entry, though there is a fee for parking. It's a heritage attraction that has brought back to life many of Wales' vital buildings, since 1948 more than forty original buildings from different historical periods have been re-erected in the 100-acre parkland, among them houses, a farm, a school, a chapel and a Workmen's Institute. It placed ninth in the TripAdvisor review research.
Top 10 UK cities for best day out:
- Leeds
- Nottingham
- Cardiff
- Chester
- Oxford
- Cambridge
- Bristol
- Birmingham
- Bath
- Liverpool
Find out more about tombola's research, here.
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