Seventy years ago, an Act of Parliament was created as ‘a gift for returning service men and women’. It was to cheer a country deflated by war and to calm the increasingly angry demands for public access to wild and beautiful places.
The National Parks Act 1949 was a natural progression of the ideas of the romantic poets – Wordsworth said the Lake District was ‘a sort of national property in which every man has a right and interest’ – and the Scottish naturalist and thinker John Muir, known as the Father of the National Parks in America for his work in establishing protected areas, including Yosemite in California.
1951 – Peak District
Size: 555sq miles
Population: 38,000
Visitors: 13.25 million a year
USPs: Dark Peak, White Peak and South West Peak, Kinder Scout, Nine Ladies Stone Circle, Chatsworth, Hardwick Hall, Haddon Hall, Buxton Festival, Edale (start of the Pennine Way), Dovedale, Bakewell puddings, Blue John Cavern and the Titan Shaft (Britain’s largest cave shaft)
People: The Duke and Duchess of Devonshire, Bess of Hardwick, Thomas Cook, Alan Bates, John Hurt, Florence Nightingale, Arthur Lowe, Dame Ellen MacArthur
1951 – Lake District
Size: 912sq miles
Population: 41,100
Visitors: 15.8 million
USPs: Dramatic lakes (known as meres or waters) – of which Windermere is the largest – tarns and fells, the only national park with a UNESCO listing, Dale-main’s Marmalade Festival, hound trailing, Dove Cottage, Hill Top Farm, England’s highest mountain (Scafell Pike), Lowther Show, Fell ponies, Lakeland terriers, Herdwick sheep
People: William Wordsworth, Beatrix Potter, John Peel, Alfred Wainwright, Bluebird pilot Donald Campbell, Arthur Ransome, Sir Chris Bonington, Melvyn Bragg
1951 – Dartmoor
Size: 368sq miles
Population: 34,000
Visitors: 2.3 million
USPs: The Ten Tors (there are 160-plus granite tors in all), numerous standing stones, deep mires, River Dart, River Teign, Wistman’s Wood, Widecombe Fair, Castle Drogo, Buckfast Abbey, Dart-moor Prison, The Hound of the Baskervilles, The Belstone Fox, meadow pipits, Dartmoor ponies, St Michael de Rupe church on Brentor
People: Sir Francis Drake, Uncle Tom Cobley and all, Ted Hughes, Jennifer Saunders, Adrian Edmondson, Tom Daley, Josh Widdicombe, Ann Widde-combe, Bryony Frost
1952 – North York Moors
Size: 554sq miles
Population: 23,000-plus
Visitors: 7.9 million
USPs: Egton Bridge Gooseberry Show, Lilla Cross, Scarborough, freshwater-pearl mussels of the River Esk, merlins, golden plovers, Duke of Bur-gundy butterflies (below), the Cleveland Way, Robin Hood’s Bay, the Staithes Group artists, North Yorkshire Moors Railway, Whitby, Dinosaur Coast, Heartbeat
People: Bram Stoker, Laurence Sterne, Philippa Gregory, James Herriot, Julian Norton (The Yorkshire Vet)
1954 – Yorkshire Dales
Size: 841sq miles
Population: 23,000-plus
Visitors 3.5 million
USPs: The Three Peaks (Whernside, Ingleborough and Pen-y-ghent) and 40-odd dales, brown long-eared bats, Dales ponies, Pennine Way and Pennine Bridleway, Settle-Carlisle railway, Malham Cove, Aysgarth Falls, Swaledale, Wensleydale cheese, Wuthering Heights
People: The Brontës, Hannah Hauxwell, Jodie Whittaker, Joanne Froggatt
1954 – Exmoor
Size: 267sq miles
Population: 10,600
Visitors: 2 million
USPs: Tarr Steps, Exmoor ponies, red deer, the Devon & Somerset Stag-hounds, Stoke Pero and Culbone churches, bolving contests, feral goats, high tides, Dunkery Beacon, the Caratacus Stone, Valley of the Rocks, Porlock Bay oysters, start (or finish) of the South West Coast Path, beech hedges, the Beast of Exmoor, Tarka the Otter, Lorna Doone, Dunster Castle, Snowdrop Valley, Bampton Charter Fair
People: Hope Bourne, Laura Waugh, Victor Bonham-Carter, Stanley Johnson, Rachel Johnson, the Waley-Cohens, Baroness Mallalieu, Margaret Drabble, Sir Christopher Ondaatje, Sir Ranulph Fiennes, Dieter Helm
1956 – Northumberland
Size: 405sq miles
Population: 2,000
Visitors: 1.5 million
USPs: Hadrian’s Wall, Sycamore Gap, The Cheviot, Hareshaw Linn waterfall, Cragside, the Pennine Way, Coquetdale, Brinkburn Priory (left), Harbottle and the Drake Stone, Holystone and Lady’s Well, Alwinton, Kielder Forest, Otterburn Ranges, Queen Mab, The Shadow on the Moor
People: Admiral Lord Collingwood, Willy Poole
1989 – The Broads
Size: 117sq miles
Population: 6,300
Visitors: 7.6 million
USPs: Norwich (the only English city to include part of a national park), 60-plus areas of open water and 125 miles of navigable waterway, eight traditional sailing wherries, Boudicca, Norfolk hawker dragonflies, fen raft spiders, cranes, bitterns and marsh harriers (below), the greatest concentration of windmills in Britain
People: Horatio Nelson, Arthur Ransome, Anna Sewell, Joyce Lambert, Ted Ellis
2006 – The New Forest
Size: 220sq miles
Population: 34,000
Visitors: 13.5 million
USPs: A historic Commoner grazing system – there are 500 Commoners and some 7,000 animals grazing – the New Forest Pony Drift, pannage (release of pigs to graze), fallow deer, the 180ft Wellingtonia tree on Rhinefield Drive, the 1,000-year-old Com-mon Yew in Brockenhurst churchyard, National Motor Museum at Beaulieu, Exbury Gardens
People: William the Conqueror, Florence Nightingale, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Gilbert Oswald Smith, John Douglas-Scott-Montagu, Dennis Wheatley, Sir Ben Ainslie
2010 – The South Downs
Size: 628sq miles
Population: 108,000
Visitors: 16 million
USPs: Beachy Head, polo at Cowdray, racing at Goodwood, South Downs Way, Ditchling Museum, Uppark, Long Man of Wilmington, West Dean, Charleston, Berwick church, Chanctonbury Ring, Firle Beacon, Stane Street, Devil’s Dyke, Lewes Castle, Arundel Castle
People: Jane Austen, Eric Gill, Gilbert White, the Bloomsbury set, the Dukes of Richmond and Norfolk, William Nicholson, Hugh Bonneville, Viscount Cowdray
Plymouth Sound set to become Britain's first 'National Marine Park'
Plymouth Sound is on track to become the UK's first underwater national park, protecting this rich habitat for generations to
Credit: Knight Frank
A rare Grade-II Georgian manor house in the New Forest National Park
Bartley Manor has undergone a series of renovations to return it to its former glory, with each owner since the
Credit: Steve Bjorck / Getty
The £5 million expansion of the Broads National Park called a 'unique opportunity’ by Sir David Attenborough
Thanks to the National Lottery Heritage Fund and an incredible fundraising effort from the public, Carlton Marshes will be expanding
Credit: Jackson-Stops
A picture-perfect cottage for sale in a delightful village near the coast in the North York Moors
Character homes in village locations within national parks are hard to come by – but when they do, they're hard to
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