Most British parks get their water ride from a log flume, which is a boat on a slide. Paultons Park in Hampshire is building something with a track, a chain lift and a bill for a steel manufacturer, and it wants it open next year.
What happened
Paultons Park announced Serpent’s Curse in May 2026, alongside the opening of Valgard: Realm of the Vikings. The park describes it as “a custom-built MACK Rides water coaster” with a lift hill, “fast-flowing twists and curves” and a “dramatic plunge into a final splashdown”. It sits in an extension to Valgard, and the park’s deputy managing director James Mancey said Paultons is “working with the world-renowned MACK Rides to bring their fantastic water coaster to the UK”.
Trade reports say the track has since been installed, with the water trough and splashdown section among the last elements to go in. The park itself says only that the ride arrives in 2027 and that “the exact date is yet to be confirmed”. One UK trade site gives March 2027; treat that as unconfirmed until Paultons says so.
Alongside it, the park’s junior log flume Seal Falls, which has been there since 2002, is being re-themed and moved into the extension as Little Serpents.
The detail
Paultons has not published a technical sheet. The figures below come from the Roller Coaster DataBase (RCDB), which lists the ride as under construction, and from a UK trade report that gives the same speed and length. RCDB does not say where it sourced them, so read them as provisional.
| Spec | Figure |
|---|---|
| Manufacturer | Mack Rides (installer: RCS GmbH, per RCDB) |
| Type | Steel sit-down water coaster |
| Track length | 471 m (1,545 ft) |
| Height | 23 m (75.5 ft) |
| Top speed | 71 km/h (44 mph) |
| Inversions | None |
| Lift | Single chain lift hill |
| Opening | 2027 (date unconfirmed) |
You may also see a height of 34.6 ft and a length of 346 ft in circulation. That doesn’t survive contact with the other numbers: 346 ft is about 105 m, which cannot be a 471 m ride. We’ve used the RCDB figures and left the park’s undisclosed height restriction out altogether, since Paultons says that hasn’t been confirmed.
What it actually means
Start with the water coaster itself, because the name gets used loosely. A log flume runs boats along a water-filled channel and lets gravity do the rest. A water coaster is a coaster that happens to be wet: the boat-train rides on steel track with wheels, is hauled up a chain lift hill, and is steered by the track rather than by the water. The water arrives at the end, in the splashdown trough, where the boat is brought to rest by the water, with brakes finishing the job at the station. It is a coaster with a pond problem.
That problem is the engineering. Everything on the boat that would normally sit dry has to be designed for a soaking every few minutes, and the boat then has to carry its own water out of the trough and back through a block-sectioned circuit. Mack has been building these for years, and it already has Dønnervind in Germany, a launched variant that went further down the same road. Serpent’s Curse looks like the more conventional design, with a chain lift rather than launches. That is no criticism; a chain lift is the simplest thing that works, and on a wet ride, simple is a virtue.
Now the “first”. Trade reports call it the UK’s first Mack water coaster and, in places, the UK’s first water coaster. The first is easy to accept: Paultons itself says it is bringing the ride type to the UK. The second depends on your definition. Britain has plenty of log flumes, river rapids and shoot-the-chute rides, and none of those is a coaster by the definition above. We couldn’t find a previous British example of this kind of ride, but we’d stick with “Mack’s first in the UK” as the claim the evidence fully supports.
Finally, the park. Paultons is a family-run business that keeps reinvesting rather than waiting for a corporate budget cycle, and it has now put a Viking land, an inverting coaster and a custom Mack ride into one corner of the site. Compare that with the rest of the British market, where a single new Mack ride at Legoland Windsor only emerged from planning documents.
The Dispatch verdict
A sensible, unflashy ride from a manufacturer with a good record and a park that spends its money well. The numbers, if RCDB is right, describe a family-thrill water coaster rather than a record chaser: 71 km/h (44 mph) and a 23 m (75 ft) peak is plenty for a ride that ends in a wave. What we don’t yet know is the height restriction, the boat configuration or the opening date, and until Paultons publishes them this is a promising announcement rather than a finished story.
Further reading: how Mack’s launched water coaster works at Dønnervind, how chain lift hills work, our guide to the manufacturers, Mack’s other British project, at Legoland Windsor, and ProSlide’s jet-propelled alternative in Brazil.