The Telegraph 26 Jul 08;
National Parks must cater for humans as well as animals, says Exmoor native Adrian Tierney-Jones
It's 7am on the craggy slopes of Tryfan in the Snowdonia National Park. The wild magnificence of the mountains is exhilarating as I climb in splendid isolation.
But, four hours later, as I come down, I am squeezed against the rock as a long queue of eager mountaineers take turns at ascending the spiky northern crest. Down below, the sun glints off the hordes of cars crammed along the verges.
A few hundred miles south in Exmoor, there's a crush of cars and armies of picnickers at Landacre Bridge, where the River Barle cuts through a landscape of bleakly beautiful moorland.
As the summer progresses, parts of the Lake District will close to traffic as the crowds throng to walk in Wordsworth's footsteps. A trip to a National Park has never been more popular. But is this a good thing or not?
Monday sees the start of National Parks Week, a celebration of Britain's 14 natural reserves. There's no doubt that, as air, light and noise pollution increases, the parks remain important oases of tranquillity for city dwellers - somewhere to escape the frenzied consumerism of our age.
According to Frances Whitehead at Northumberland National Park, they also have an important environmental role: "Restoration (rewetting) of the Border Mires and upland blanket bogs is sequesting many times more carbon in the earth than the equivalent area in forests," she says.
"It is storing and slowing the movement of rainwater through the landscape, avoiding flash-flooding." Similarly important environmental and wildlife projects are happening in all parks across the country.
However, there is a dilemma. The greater the park's popularity, the more chance of environmental damage. Too many visitors and you get erosion and disturbance of habitats. Property prices can also rise alarmingly. Living on Exmoor, I repeatedly hear the very valid complaints of long-established local families whose youngsters simply cannot get a toehold on the housing ladder.
There is also a slightly queasy "preserved in aspic" element in park life. Dunster, for example, is on the southernmost edge of Exmoor and is a magical village, complete with fairytale castle, cobbled streets, ancient stone-built inn and medieval yarn market.
Take a closer look, though, and you'll notice that, apart from a post office and a hardware shop, there is not one practical everyday shop. No butcher, no baker, not even a Co-op. Shopping in Dunster is aimed firmly at the tourists - if you were stuck there, you'd end up surviving on fudge.
Living in a park isn't the rural idyll you would imagine. Small schools, post offices and shops close as houses are snapped up by outsiders. Many National Park villages lie in darkness in winter, as second homes stay empty. Rural poverty is not unknown: the average wage in the Lake District, for example, is £15,000 per annum.
Planning regulations can be obtuse and petty. Back in 1999, our Exmoor valley was due to be converted to mains electricity. But the National Park (along with the Ramblers' Association) objected to the plan, because the wires would "spoil the view".
It was back to the drawing-board and, a year later, the wires went underground - at a cost that several neighbours simply couldn't afford.
Lisa Brumby has lived on Dartmoor for 30 years and has mixed feelings. "I often wonder what previous eras would make of our treatment of Dartmoor today," she says. "In past times Dartmoor was a place of great industrial activity - tinning, quarrying, granite working, peat and clay extraction.
I wonder if we try a bit too hard to preserve it today? On the other hand, I do believe we need an authority to avoid the sort of awfulness you find at Land's End. However, their actions should be tempered with common sense."
Rachel Thomas is the president of the Exmoor Society, which she describes as a "critical friend" of the Exmoor National Park authority. "We do need the parks," she insists. "They have incredible resources and an amazing bio-diversity. You can go on to parts of Exmoor and Dartmoor and there is a Bronze Age landscape. We need this wildness."
I agree. Our national parks are essential, especially as the Government seems intent on covering rural England in concrete. In fact, I'd argue, we could probably do with extending their boundaries or creating new parks to safeguard other vulnerable rural areas.
However, in order to survive without being Disney-fied, it is essential that parks remain living, working landscapes. I would like to see a commitment to creating, within the existing confines of park towns and villages, affordable local housing and local business opportunities.
There should also be help and encouragement for traditional ways of farming and rural skills (hill farming is in crisis and, if it goes, then the landscapes we love so much will go with it). To be fair, park authorities do seem to be waking up to the problems that affect local people.
The bottom line is, I'd rather have the parks than not (without them, I dread to think how our wildernesses would look). We should be friends of the parks but always, as Rachel Thomas says, critical friends.
