CHANGES to parking arrangements at one of the county’s most popular National Trust sites have been given the green light by the council.

The National Trust wants to swap around two overflow parking sites at grade-one-listed Croome Court near Worcester to make “sensible” changes ahead of the busy summer holidays.

The ‘orchard’ at Croome has been used as a secondary car park at the expense of ‘paddock’, which was bought by the National Trust in 2017 and can only be used for 28 days a year.

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The planning application asking to carry out the change has been approved by officers at Malvern Hills District Council.

The National Trust said Croome’s 245 car park spaces are usually more than enough to accommodate cars on days with fewer than 1,500 visitors – with the busiest days requiring the use of the paddock to the north and orchard to the south to pack in more cars.

At the moment, the orchard has been used for overflow parking with the paddock only allowed to be used for 28 days throughout the year – a lot fewer than the one hundred days the National Trusts thinks it would need to accommodate boosts in visitors on Croome’s busiest days.

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The National Trust said it would prefer to use the currently restricted paddock for overflow parking as it is in a better location near Croome’s visitor centre car park, less intrusive for neighbours and further away from the grade-one-listed Church of St Mary Magdalene.

The orchard, which has the same space for between 160 and 180 cars that the paddock does, would continue to be used during busier periods but only for 28 days throughout the year.

Croome Court welcomed around 290,000 visitors in the year before the Covid-19 pandemic, according to the National Trust, and numbers are recovering – reaching just under 245,000 in the last 12 months.