Outstandingly beautiful
The UK has 86 areas of officially outstanding scenery in addition to the National Parks. Below the most famous tier, yet no less beautiful – and much more abundant – they’re yours to discover. Here are six of the best to start with.
86 areas of officially outstanding scenery await your tread.
1 Glen Affric (NSA)
While Scotland is short of National Parks, it abounds with National Scenic Areas – 40 of them, in fact. It’s like a National Park franchise model, and in a country where beauty is so widespread and so universal it’s no wonder they do it like this. What the NSAs help to do is turn the overwhelming feast that is the vast Scottish landscape into an approachable selection box – and thanks to their abundance, variety and less concentrated tourism, you’re less likely to have to fight for your pick. Glen Affric’s NSA is like someone’s attempt to draw a ring around a portion of paradise you’d never have need or want to leave. A beautiful valley cupped by eight mighty Munros to the north and quiet Corbetts to the south, enclosing lovely Loch Affric, fringed with Caledonian pinewood, that most evocative of Scottish scenesetters. It’s unlikely any of us will ever afford to stay in the baronial Affric Lodge, in the cleavage of the valley, but a night in the roadless and remote Glen Affric Youth Hostel at its throat is unlikely to be any less unforgettable.
2 Assynt-Coigach (NSA)
Scotland’s version of Jurassic Park, Assynt-Coigach houses some of the most world’s most wonderfully monstrous and prehistoric-looking peaks. Curtainsided Suilven, sandstone stegosaur Stac Pollaidh, shark’s-tooth Quinag and towering dreadnought
Cul Mor are transfixingly hostilelooking beasts, and the fact they can all be climbed relatively easily remains walkers’ wonderful secret. Each holds magnificent court in a landscape of lochan-dotted Flow Country quite unlike anything you’ll associate with supposedly ‘little’ Britain.
WALK HERE – download Stac Pollaidh from livefortheoutdoors.co.uk/bonusroutes
3 Forest of Bowland
Only in the shadow of superstars like the Lake District and the Yorkshire Dales would beauty like Bowland’s be invisible. And thanks to its AONB status and sparse settlements it’s likely to always feel like your secret discovery. By some reckoning, the hamlet of Dunsop Bridge in the middle of the AONB is the centre of Britain, yet you’ll rarely feel further from the centre of anything. In spite of the name these are wild, open, woolly hills marked by the thread-vein meanders of lonely brooks and rivers, solitary paths, the cry of curlew and great gulfs of space. It’s mesmerisingly peaceful – and its paths are expert at conjuring the feeling of an expedition from the modest dimensions of a day.
WALK HERE – download Dunsop Bridge from www.livefortheoutdoors.co.uk/bonusroutes
4 Shropshire Hills
Planners in the 1950s were eager to gather all Shropshire’s disparate treasures in its soon-to-be AONB, and the result is a sprawling but exhaustive box-set. It includes the commanding Wrekin, the beautiful Long Mynd (which remixes some of the most charming elements of the Dales, Mid Wales and the Forest of Bowland); the lofty, scaly Stiperstones, part of Offa’s Dyke; the county-topping Clee Hills and the 19-mile limestone escarpment of Wenlock Edge, first seen as a reef in the Caribbean 400 million years ago. Then home to trilobites and brachiopods, today Shropshire Hills AONB hosts a dizzying array of walking options – under cover of deciduous trees, along the spine of an ancient reef, across the roof of a county and into hobbity valleys.
WALK HERE download Caer Caradoc & The Lawley www.livefortheoutdoors.co.uk/ bonusroutes
5 High Weald
Stretching across three counties between the North- and South Downs, the High Weald is one of the best-preserved examples of a medieval landscape – rolling woody countryside cut by sunken driveways, and pervaded by a sense of picaresque possibility. This is a world of corners round which highwaymen might be found, clearings where tinker’s palms might be crossed with silver, and heaths where strange beasts or brigands might be happened upon. A mosaic of ancient woodland, open grasslands, steep-sided wooded gills, small villages and sandstone outcrops, there are views too – the AONB rising to over 700ft in both Ashdown Forest (home of Winnie the Pooh) and at Crowborough Beacon. But with 1500 miles of footpath to discover across over 550 square miles, it’s a place better pieced together in your mind through endless meanders, than summarised in any postcard pic.
6 Mourne Mountains
Mountains always look best by the sea, and the Mournes offer 12 tight-packed peaks and fine wild country, sweeping right down to the briny in County Down. Offering spectacular views and satisfying, dramatic walking, the Mournes are home to Slieve Donard – at 2789ft (850m), Northern Ireland’s highest peak – and the Mourne Wall, an up to 8ft-tall, 22-mile drystone barrier 18 years in the building, the course of which – over 15 tops – has become a popular challenge walk. These granite giants offer a Cairngorm-like sense of adventure, and may yet one day similarly graduate to National Park status – the Mournes being subject to a long-running consultation on the matter. Whatever happens, they’ll always be an inspiration for CS Lewis’s Narnia and a real-life Westeros for the directors of Game of Thrones.
WALK HERE download Slieve Donard from www.livefortheoutdoors.co.uk/ bonusroutes