Peaks and troughs

Pinehurst II, Pinehurst Road, Farnborough Business Park, Farnborough, Hampshire GU14 7BF 0330 390 6591; www.countrylife.co.uk

DANIEL DEFOE described High Peak as ‘the most desolate, wild and abandoned country in all England’, but, as Britain’s first designated national park celebrates its 70th birthday, few people will recall a time when this striking Peak District landscape was not accessible to all. The reward came after decades of mostly polite protest. As poets rhapsodised about ‘untamed’ countryside and ramblers roamed, enabled by modern transport, so, too, did gamekeeper and landowner associations form. There was inevitable conflict, the embers of which are still regularly poked.

In 1932, Benny Rothman led the famous Mass Trespass across the bleak wastes of Kinder Scout. At his trial, he said: ‘We ramblers, after a hard week’s work, in smoky towns and cities, go out rambling for relaxation and fresh air… our request, or demand, for access to all peaks and uncultivated moorland is nothing unreasonable.’

What Rothman was requesting we, rightly, now take for granted. Yet, nearly 90 years after his speech, national parks are under no less intense pressures; there is a desperate need for new, affordable housing and an uncomfortable realisation that biodiversity levels may not be higher inside parks than out. It’s an inconvenient dichotomy that ground-nesting birds and rare wildflowers do not enjoy being trampled on and, although deer don’t mind being stared at from a distance, other wildlife is shyer. Disgracefully, wild camping often leads to wild litter; badly behaved dogs injure livestock. Many of the public-transport routes that carried those energetic early protestors to the moors no longer exist, but the original narrow roads do and they can’t cope with camper vans. Unlike in America, Britain’s national parks are populated with humans, albeit with restricted ways to make a living: tourism and farming, mainly of livestock, are the chief economic drivers. Much preservation of natural beauty is quietly carried out by private landowners, who recognise that their forebears were wrong to deny access.

As Peak District chief executive Sarah Fowler explained on World at One last week, what is seen as a national asset is chiefly privately owned—the National Park owns less than 5% of its 550 square miles: ‘Actually, a lot of our work is about working with those individuals and organisations that care and are custodians of the landscape, and it’s about ensuring that we have the funding and the ability to support them to be champions of Nature.’

Britain’s national parks remain undiminished in their drama, from the Cairngorms to the Broads, the New Forest to Dartmoor, the Lake District to the Brecon Beacons, but do we appreciate, respect and revere these places as much as did the campaigners of 1951?