England at its best

The Exmoor National Park Authority is celebrating its 70th birthday. Kate Green recounts what makes this 'high country of the winds', of deer, dark skies, tough ponies and resilient farmers, so special

- Kate Green

THE high country of the winds, which are to the falcons and the hawks,' wrote the rural author Henry Williamson, 'clothed by whortleberry bushes and lichens and ferns and mossed trees in the goyals, which are to the foxes, the badgers and the red deer: served by rain-clouds and drained by rock-littered streams, which are to the otters.' He was describing Exmoor in the decades before its official designation as one of Britain's 15 national parks, the 70th anniversary of which is this weekend (October 19).

At 267 square miles, Exmoor is the fourth smallest national park-after the Broads, New Forest and Pembrokeshire coast-one of the least populated (fewer than 11,000 people and shrinking) and, arguably, one of the least heralded. There are no major roads through it and its geographical position on a dog-leg off the arterial routes to south Devon and Cornwall means that motorists and train travellers tend to whistle past; it receives about two million visitors a year compared with some 16 million in the Lake District. Although house prices aren't cheap, Exmoor isn't dominated by second-homers and any new housing is designated for local needs.

It is, principally, a farmed landscape; the romantic wild, heathery expanses and steep, wooded combes for which it is famed actually only comprise about 25% of the area and they are interspersed with fields. The National Park includes the once-mined Brendon Hills; this is now sparsely populated farming and forested country and, weather-wise, arguably wilder than the moor itself.

Exmoor's beauty is in the infinite rising and falling of the skyline, way, way into the distance, its trees-the writer Hope Bourne, who lived in a desolate caravan beside the River Barle, described its beeches as 'breaking over the harsh moorland landscape like a benediction-and its ever-changing palette of colours: pink and purple heather, red rowan berries, yellow gorse, rust-red soil, greygreen sea and velvet forests.