Action is needed to secure setting fit for status

THEY’VE picked the wrong national park. Or rather, compounding the error, two national parks.

After years of deliberation, it has been agreed that the Lake District and the Yorkshire Dales national parks shall expand. They’ll virtually link up with each other in the corridor between the A6 and the M6.

Approved by the Government, the change has been a dream for decades of the two national parks and pressure groups like the Yorkshire Dales Society and Friends of the Lake District. But can any of the tracts of countryside soon to be granted the highest level of landscape protection, stretching from Orton Fells, near Penrith, in the north, to an area centred on Kirby Lonsdale in the south, be said to be facing serious threat? No.

And if they remained outside a national park would either the Dales or the Lakes national parks as they now exist be any the worse? No again.

Yet, some 70 or so miles to the east, there’s an area of countryside bordering a national park that is coming under mounting development pressure. And unless the blight is checked, the damage to its national park neighbour will be immense, perhaps even terminal.

The scene is the North York Moors. More exactly its northern rim, where the dramatic escarpment of the Cleveland Hills plunges suddenly to the Cleveland plain. Coastal cliffs apart, this escarpment is the most sharply-defined physical boundary of any of Britain’s 15 national parks. So it might seem entirely appropriate that the park’s administrative boundary largely follows the foot of the hills.

But from the escarpment, only narrowly within the park, the view out is as important as the view in. What happens on the adjacent farmland is crucial to the enjoyment of what is acknowledged – and promoted – as one of the most spectacular features of the Moors. Many would say that the escarpment, which carries the Cleveland Way, the Lyke Wake Walk and - a worldwide draw - Wainwright’s Coast to Coast offers the best walking in the national park.

Certainly the former National Parks Commission, which set up the national parks, recognised the importance of a proper setting for this jewel in the crown. Its proposed boundary for the park here ran two miles in front of the hills, along the Stockton-Whitby railway between Carlton and Battersby. But, with undeniable logic, farmers argued convincingly that the farming on the plain was very different from that in the moors. So the Government tightened the boundary – so tightly in fact that at Hasty Bank, south of Stokesley, the boundary is almost half way up the escarpment, separating a farmhouse from its buildings.

But though nine square miles were lost, for 50 or so years after the park was designated in 1952, the boundary line didn’t matter too much. But since the millennium, pressure on the plain has grown. A 25-acre industrial estate has erupted just beyond the rejected two-mile boundary. From parts of the escarpment, notably Carlton Bank, it presents a considerable blot.

Land within the intended boundary has been marketed as having “future development potential”. Random “travellers” sites have sprung up. And, though defeated, a major housing development virtually abutting the boundary at Great Ayton, and a large “holiday park” now planned between the same village and Stokesley point ominously to potentially further degradation of the park’s northern perimeter.

Add in developments like a golf driving range at Stokesley, a source of serious light pollution, and it’s beginning to look as if even the two mile boundary might not provide a sufficient buffer for the national park.

If still in business, the National Parks Commission probably would not have thought so. For even after their two-mile boundary had been rejected, they reaffirmed their belief in the need for it.

A few years ago, at one of the national park authority’s “area forums”, I attempted to alert the park’s guardians to the threat to the park from the sporadic developments on its northern fringe. My concern was swept aside with the view that there was sufficient to do within the existing boundary.

Indeed there is. And no doubt that’s equally true of the Lake District and Yorkshire Dales national parks as presently composed, though they are now set to expand by three per cent and 24 per cent respectively.

Of course, to all who value the British countryside, extra protection awarded to any landscape is welcome.

Possibly in a minority of two, I share with Bill Bryson, author of Notes From a Small Island and a former President of the Council for the Protection of Rural England, the belief that the whole of our hard-pressed countryside should receive the same standard of care now reserved for the parts considered most beautiful. The slackening of planning controls is increasingly placing any countryside not designated ‘special,’ for either beauty or nature conservation, at risk of whatever a developer might choose to throw at it.

But universal protection is not going to arrive. And the sad fact remains that the campaigners who have striven long and hard to win national-park protection for more of our wonderful north country have been focussing on the wrong place.

Yet the importance of the Cleveland plain to the North York Moors was prominently, if unconsciously, signalled by Natural England, the Government’s landscape advisor, whose approval for the expansion of the Lakes and the Dales led to the Government’s rubber stamp. Until recently its website was headed by a photo of Easby Hill, part of the Cleveland escarpment crowned by Captain Cook’s monument, as seen from the plain.

There’s more. When the Moors national park was being set up consideration was given to including the Eston Hills, the last proud fling of the moors, overlooking the Tees estuary. They were ruled out because of urban encroachment along their foot. If, ultimately, the main massif of the moors is not to suffer the same fate, action is needed now - to secure a setting fit for a landscape labelled ‘national park’.