What are our national parks really for?

It is difficult to reconcile the twin aims of preserving nature and attracting ever greater numbers of visitors

We have the Romantic poets to thank for the Lake District, as we understand it today. Previous generations had not cared much for mountain scenery. In the 19th century, the aesthete John Ruskin, a rhapsodic enthusiast for the Lakes who built a house on Coniston Water, poured scorn on classical authors for failing to appreciate natural grandeur. “As far as I recollect, without a single exception, every Homeric landscape intended to be beautiful is composed of a fountain, a meadow and a shady grove,” he wrote. In the medieval period, Petrarch was the only writer to view mountains without terror. Before Wordsworth’s birth at Cockermouth in 1770, the Lake

District had been regarded as an impoverished and inconvenient landscape, principally of interest for its lead mines.

Now, by contrast, it’s one of the glories of Britain and a Unesco World Heritage Site. Since 1951, it has been a national park. There are now 15 national parks in the UK, the idea being that they should preserve outstanding landscapes, rural if not exactly wild. On the whole, they’ve done a good job. Yet when it comes to the Lake District, we are told, there is a problem. The park is not visited equally by the population at large. Ethnic minorities and the disabled should be enjoying more of this fantastic resource.

This is a worthy ambition. The trouble is that the national parks already face their own challenges. People who have been walking the fells of the Lake District for decades, Wainwright guidebooks in hand, object to the increase in tourism. Paths are worn bald. In fact the original lines of the paths widen out, under the pressure of feet, until they become a walkers’ superhighway. Those who dress in the traditional dun-coloured clothing fume at the sight of brightly coloured cagoules on the other side of the mountain. Like Wordsworth, they want to wander lonely as a cloud, but instead find themselves trailing along like ants. And this is without the busloads of Asian visitors who come to witness the places made sacred by Beatrix Potter and Peter Rabbit.

Let’s all take a deep breath. Our national parks aren’t like those in the United States – the first of which, Yosemite, was decreed by Abraham Lincoln. There, they seek to preserve fragments of the primordial wilderness. Our countryside is different. It has been inhabited, farmed, forested, felled or otherwise exploited for hundreds, if not thousands, of years. Some of the stone walls and other landscape features in the Lake District are prehistoric. Hills that were once swathed in trees are now nibbled bald by sheep. Tourism is just another industry to come to an area that has always lived by its wits and natural resources. Today, most visitors do not stray far beyond the villages, car parks or easy walks; it is still possible for the determined to get away from the madding crowd.

To increase the variety of folk who visit must be a good thing. But let’s also show common sense. Like some medieval buildings – castles, for example – mountain paths are not naturally wheelchair friendly. In the

Lakes, the answer may lie not so much in changing the gradient of paths as providing more four-by-four access to certain areas.

The Lakes should certainly reach out to ethnic minorities; but society must ask itself why some groups resist the pleasures of the countryside while other categories of immigrant embrace it. As in an art gallery, full of works produced by white males working within the traditions of a culture based on Christianity and the classics, there is no obvious point of connection with people of, for example, Afro-caribbean stock. And yet such people might enjoy it if only they had the chance. In the past, this chance was provided by school trips. All too often these days, head teachers have neither the budget, nor the staff to do risk assessments and other paperwork. We must find the money for school trips, perhaps from a visitor tax on hotel rooms.

Let’s also teach school children more about the Romantic poets who started the cult of the Lakes. Wordsworth would have been horrified to see his places of solitude being thronged by large numbers of public. Understanding what the Lake District meant to Wordsworth would itself discourage over-tourism.