Castle Park Cricket Ground
cricket ground in Colchester, England
Castle Park Cricket Ground is an English cricket ground in Castle Park, Colchester. The ground is in Lower Castle Park, part of the land surrounding Colchester Castle and within the area of the Historic England Grade II registered park and garden. It was used by Essex County Cricket Club for some of their first-class cricket matches between 1914 and 2016. When the ground is not used to stage First-class cricket matches, it is frequently used for Colchester & East Essex Cricket Club.
History
The ground was opened in 1908 and the first match played here was on 18 June 1914 between Essex and Worcestershire in the County Championship. The ground is bordered by the remains of a Roman Wall.
Due to the River Colne running alongside the ground, there used to be regular problems of drainage. In 1966, a match in progress was moved to Colchester's secondary venue, the Garrison A Cricket Ground. Matches returned to the ground in 1974 when a John Player League match was played and Essex played on the ground annually until 2016. Since 2017 matches at the ground have been "suspended" as a result of changes to the ways in which fixtures are arranged by the England and Wales Cricket Board.
“Castle Park Cricket Ground” enters the record as cricket ground in Colchester, England. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Castle, Park and Cricket can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jun 25, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q5050212. Authority coordinates are 51.895, 0.903. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1914, 2016, 1908 and 1966.
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This entry incorporates text from “Castle Park Cricket Ground” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.