Belle Isle State Park
Virginia State Park On The Tidal Rappahannock In Lancaster County; Includes The Nineteenth Century Bel Air Mansion. Not To Be Confused With Belle Isle In Richmond. · Lancaster, Virginia
Seven hundred and thirty acres of tidal marsh, creek and farmland on the Rappahannock in Lancaster County, deep in the Northern Neck, and one of the best paddling parks in Virginia for the simple reason that it has seven miles of shoreline and almost nobody on it. The park is laced with tidal guts and creeks - Mulberry Creek and Deep Creek work into the land from the river - and at high tide you can put a kayak in and disappear into marsh channels where the only things moving are herons, ospreys and fiddler crabs. It is flat, it is protected from the main river, and it is genuinely quiet in a way that the Potomac parks upstream are not. On land there are gentle trails through fields and woods, a fishing pier, a boat ramp, and Bel Air, a nineteenth-century mansion the park rents out whole as a guest house, which is an unusual thing for a Virginia state park to offer. It is not the Belle Isle in Richmond, and searches confuse the two constantly.
1632 Belle Isle Road, Lancaster, Virginia, 22503, United States
Park open daily, generally 8 AM to dusk with seasonal variation. Visitor centre keeps shorter hours and is reduced in winter. Kayak rental is SEASONAL and weather-dependent. Camping, cabins and the Bel Air mansion are by reservation, and Bel Air is rented as a whole house for groups. Parking fee per vehicle, separate launch fee per boat. PADDLE AT HIGH TIDE - the marsh guts go to mud at low water.
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