Yes...a new theme park in Scotland yes please!
Of course I know our population and weather can scare of anyone wanting to build a park here, though the best place to build one (as mentioned earlier in the topic) is in the lowland area (Edinburgh and Glasgow) where the population there is the biggest, it would also give a theme park for those living in the far north of England.
And with M&D's, they did actually wanted to make themselves into a theme park by expanding it, though the council refused, thus instead, we got the world's worst roller coaster...
For such a beautiful land we Scots have to offer, why no one decided to make a large woody up beside a mountain or Loch is beyond me...
Sorry if this seems a bit too in depth, it's just something I've given a lot of thought to over the last few years.
I think that
this map really shows the extent of the problem. There's almost an invisible boundary running between Blackpool and Middlesbrough. It's like the tree line on a mountain, the parks exist wherever they can attract enough visitors but beyond that, nothing until M&D's and Cadona's.
I think that a successful Scottish park would have to start small and gradually build in size and reputation starting as an "and" attraction rather than the main tourist draw for the area.
Massive high-stakes multi-million brand new parks are nearly always a disaster. Look at Terra Mitica, on paper it looks like a brilliant idea. Benidorm is a tourist hotspot with a number of successful waterparks and animal attractions already operating in the area. If you were to build a massive theme park there, how could it not be succesful? But for whatever reason when it opened, the numbers they predicted just didn't show up.
I totally agree with you that it would be brilliant to utilise Scotland's dramatic landscapes for the purposes of a beautiful theme park with amazing terrain coasters but a lot of the best landscapes have low populations, terrible infrastructure, fearsome weather in winter and most tourists in the area are more interested in walking. There's also the issue of being allowed to build it. I reckon you'd just about get away with building a park at somewhere like Loch Lomond or Aviemore which are already quite developed but sprawling mountain-side woodies would probably be out of the question.
I reckon the most feasible location for a park in a beautiful location is around the Clyde valley. There's countless wind farms in that area as well as a the M74 and the West Coast mainline so I doubt a theme park would have much impact on the landscape in comparison. The motorway would also provide easy access from Glasgow and attract visitors on their way from England. It could even have its own branch off the railway if things got serious.
Another possible place for a park is near the Forth Bridges. The bridges themselves bring in a lot of tourists and there's already a few attractions in that area. Plus it's on Edinburgh's doorstep which is the biggest tourist draw in Scotland.
My last idea is a small, well themed city park like Tivoli Gardens. Tivoli gets some of the highest visitor numbers in Europe and has managed to become a part of Copenhagen and a must-see attraction in the city. A new park couldn't recreate the history that Tivoli has but I think something similar could work well in Edinburgh.
