Peak National Park and Ride

Andrew Griffihs asks what the future holds for transport in the Peak National Park and talks to Julian Glover about his Landscapes Review

They say the true character is revealed in times of crisis and that presented by Covid-19 has taught us many things about the character of our society.

The time spent in lockdown made many of us look carefully at our lives. Some of us developed a new-found love for nature. Because we were confined to our homes it made us look closer at what had been under our noses all the time and many of us were delighted with what we found.

As lockdown restrictions eased we began to travel further afield, and this soon put unprecedented pressure on our National Parks. Beauty spots became honeypots as crowds flocked to the same, familiar places. We all saw the pictures on television and the Peak National Park did not escape as the usual suspects became swamped with day-trippers: Dovedale and Stanage amongst those so afflicted.

This leads to the paradox: lockdown gave many a new appreciation of beautiful landscapes and nature close to home, but by exercising that newly discovered passion, people are in danger of destroying the very thing they have grown to love.

This is nothing new, as Peak Park Authority Chair Andrew McCloy documented in a recent article on gritstonecoop.co.uk, where he quotes one visitor as finding: ‘An indescribable heap of filthy paper, empty fruit tins, broken bottles, cigarette and chocolate wrappers, matchboxes, cigarette ends and other litter’. This was at Stanage, after a raucous Bank Holiday weekend, as reported in the Sheffield Daily Telegraph - in 1929!