Park 50Th Anniversary Programme Details I 1 50
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"9.^ "^r Q 5^ 00 .« t ^ \0 t' 0 I « The Golden Jubilee ofa rkshirc Dales National Park Si>riei\ The 50th Anniversaiy Book The Badger, the Witch, the Jester, the Rabbit and the Tandem -Jubilee Celebrations Park 50th Anniversary Programme Details i1 50 unpopular of mechanisms, planning controls, comprehensive visitor interpretation and education Yorkshire Dales ibSfS. which because they interfere with the freedom of service, with exhibitions, publications, guided Yorkshire Dales Review Society the individual, are bitterly resented by the very walks, which have done much to raise standards of people who most benefit from planning protection. visitor understanding and behaviour - even over No.86 ' Spring 2004 Because without the major achievements of such issues as litter - ail to prove the miserable development control, however unpopular it has Canutes of 50 years ago completely wrong. Ajiother Journal of the Yorkshire Dales Society Editors Colin and Fleur Speakman been among Dales communities, much of the huge success story is the rights of way network landscape we know and love in the National Park which is now superbly waymarked and maintained, would have been lost for ever under executive in sharp contrast to the dismal situation elsewhere housing estates, roadside bungalows, chalet parks, in North Yorkshire outside the Park boundaries. ll>e Golden Jubilee ofa caravan sites, themed "leisure" centres, huge Much of this is due to outstanding work by extended quarries, massive new roads, dreary National Park field staff and Dales Volunteers with mono-culture afforestation. National Park A view ofSwaledale. j To a considerable degree the success of the National Park over the last fifty Fifty years is most of a lifetime. How profoundly NFU walked into the meeting room and lipped a years lies in all those things we don't the world has changed since that day in October sack of rubbish onto the Inspector's desk that he see. In the twenty first century, 1954. when after prolonged debate and much claimed to have collected at Setnerwater the unspoiled villages are a tribute argument, the Yorkshire Dales National Park was previous day, as proof that the new National Park to planning excellence. established. It is difficult for people who grew up would simply bring litter louts and vandals. in the affluent years at the end of the 20^^ century But it has been a long, slow battle. It is easy to mock such ignorant buffoonery and to realise that the great 1949 National Parks Act was The late Arthur Dower, (brother of bigotiy. National Parks were a new concept and conceived and passed at a time of acute national National Park visionary John Dower) for many privileged people living in secluded post-war shortages, when food rationing had not a founder member of the Yorkshire places, creating a National Park would simply open ended and most people in Britain lived in Dales Society, who lived in the floodgates, conditions which today we would regard as below Wensleydale, correctly prophesied at the poverty line. Yet those campaigners and What they were incapable of understanding was a National Park Rally in 1954 that legislators had a vision which led directly to the that with or without National Parks people were it had taken 25 years to secure the National Parks of today. going to come anyhow. On a single Bank Holiday creation of National Parks and it Monday in 1946 — eight years before the Park was would take another 25 years "to put the National a host of footpath maintenance and upland But even after the National Park Act was pa.ssed, created - over 42,000 people arrived by excursion Parks right". conservation projects, which have made a real difference to the quality of visitor experience of the there was bitterness and hostility to the very trains at the tiny station at Bolton Abbey. Within a Until 1974 the Yorkshire Dales National Park was concept of people living in Britain's towns and generation even such numbers would be dwarfed little more than a line on a map, with, unbelievably Dales. Good signing and waymarking have cities being allowed in the countryside at all. There by the tidal flow of weekend and holiday visitors as it seems today, two separate committees for the fundamentally helped to reduce involuntary was opposition not only from farmers and arriving in their own cars on the new roads and Old North and West Ridings, and just four full-time trespass and related problems suffered by farmers motorways from the nearby conurbations. Wardens with specific duties within the National as walkers stray away from blocked or hidden A YDS \Yalk at Hell Gi paths. National Park specialists in archaeology, These people were not coming to the Dales Park - Wilf Procter, Norman Crossley, Lawrence Barker and Joe Shevelan - and a contemptuously ecological biodiversity, woodland, vernacular because .someone had called it a National Park. architecture, and farming have not only carried out They were coming because they knew and cared minute budget. Only in 1974 was our first National Park Officer, Richard Harvey, appointed, with a research to enrich our understanding, but have about the Yorkshire Dales, and shared a deep love helped develop a huge variety of practical projects, team of specialist staff, and a more reali.stic budget. of a countiyside for which, after having fought two such as the highly praised Dales barns and walls He was answerable to a single National Park Wc^rld Wars to maintain our national freedoms, they scheme. These have helped draw down partnership Committee, but this was still technically a fell was part ol their birthright — or, as we nc^w say, funds from a myriad of sources including the EU. Committee of North Yorkshire County Council, who their heritage. The Yorkshire Dales Millennium Tmst, brainchild of often blocked its decisions and cut its spending. the National Park, had, at last reckoning, attracted However those who opposed the National Park Finally in 1995 that Committee became a free over £10 million to the Dales through the were right in one sense. If such huge numbers of standing Authority, and not surprisingly, over the landowners. i">ut from local authorities resenting visitors came with little or no understanding ot the Environet, Dales Living Landscape and other last decade staff and other resources have grown separate projects, almost eveiy penny of which has (I o \ e rn m e ni i nl e r fe re n c e in t h e i r pa rt i c u I a r countryside or carefully planned visitor facilities to a significant degree reflecting successive fiefdom.s. Both the old North Riding and West and appropriate visitor management, their very been spent in the Dales, and directly and indirectly Governments' greater commitment to the National Riding (-ounty (Councils vehemently opposed the pre.sence would be a threat to that countryside in gone into the wage packets and into the hands of Park ideal. new Dales i-^ark. At the Public Inqtiiry into terms of inappropriate behaviour, erosion, traffic small businesses, trades people and craftsmen designation, the West Riding County Council congestion, unsightly parking and unlimited The achievements over the last 50 years have been living within and around the National Park. Planning OlTicer said that his County Council demand for cheap weekend and holiday significant and many. The hugely successful public- None of this would have happened without the regarded the (.'ontribulion the County Council accommodation. Canute-like, the protesters naively Access Agreements on the Chat.sworth Estate have National Park. Like any bureaucracy, the National would ha\'e to make to the new National Park of assumed that by ignoring these problems they proved highly successful and a model of their kind. Park is only as good as the people who operate the .42.BOO (ec|ui\aleni to ju.si one eleventh of an old would ju.st go away. A network of Visitor Centres, dose to strategically system, and it is easy to list the mistakes, errors of pi.-nn\ on tlie rates) as '"a complete waste of situated car parks and toilets not only meet the judgement or inefficiencies which .Members of the moniA ' . whilst the solicitor representing the local With National Park designation came that most basic requirements of visitors, but are part of a Authority as well as indl\idual officers have perpetuated over the last five decades. Officialdom without the massive investment in conservation can be infuriating. We can have some sympathy now taking place; most of this investment with our own member Martin Vallance when he encouraged and inspired by the National Park. It questioned in the press if, with a budget of over £4 would be an inaccessible countryside with blocked million annually, and a staff of well over 100, the footpaths and missing footbridges, and angry The 50th Anniversary Book farmers helpless to deal with visitors who would Dalesbiis at A irton simply make their own way across farmland and David Joy, its editor and co-author, makes no artists to capture the many contrasting facets of the fellsides when and wherever they could. apologies for producing yet another work on area today. Understanding and appreciation would be at a the Yorkshire Dales. lower level and tourism would be in terminal Finally, the book embraces the new generation of decline as visitors sought more attractive, better "This one is different," I state emphatically when dalesfolk. Children from Primary Schools were managed areas both in the UK and abroad. It is asked for the twentieth time to justify adding to the invited to submit prose, poetry, paintings and drawings depicting what they most liked — and also naive to think that the costs of the National already great weight of literature on the Dales.