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By Root 320 0

at the ruthless, yet generally cheerful, efficiency with which the Peak District National Park deals with its many visitors. It has to: situated as it is between the great metropolises of the north and Midlands, with well over a quarter of the British population within an hour’s drive, it receives easily the greatest number of visitors of all 15 British national parks, something over ten million annually (the next most popular are all in northern England too: the Yorkshire Dales, the Lake District and the North York Moors, in that order). Yet despite this overwhelming influx, the annual spend of those visitors in the Peak District is the second lowest of all 15 parks: at £97 million per annum it’s higher only than lowly Exmoor, which receives around an eighth of the Peak’s number of visitors. The annual spend in the Lake District, by comparison, is nearly £700 million, and from two million fewer people.

On all the leaflets and notice boards locally, I’d clocked the phrase about the Peak being ‘one of the family of National Parks’, and as I climbed down towards Edale and a pint in the Old Nag’s Head, the traditional starting point of the Pennine Way, I pictured this strange, diverse family. The well-loved grandparents of the clan, whom I imagined as a sort of Phil and Jill Archer, were undoubtedly the Lake District and Snowdonia, offering their venerable wisdom to the eager whippersnappers around them. Equally aged, if a little more bellicose, was Great Uncle Cairngorms, glowering by the fire in a big leather armchair and cradling a fine malt. Pembrokeshire and the Norfolk Broads were two flash cousins glued to their iPhones, one a surf dude, the other a braying yachtie. Pony-mad little sister, the New Forest, was something straight out of a Thelwell cartoon. The Yorkshire Moors and Dales were two of your favourite aunties, who always baked the best cakes, but who also told the filthiest jokes after a couple of sweet sherries at Christmas. Hovering ethereally in the shadows was Northumberland, a mysterious distant cousin that everyone’s heard of, but no-one’s really met. And judging from the statistics, the Peak District was the staple of every family, the good time had by all, but who rarely gets so much as half a shandy bought for her afterwards.

In the Old Nag’s Head, Pennine Way and Kinder Scout ephemera coated the walls of the Hikers’ Bar, a name announced on the door. Another front door led into the Locals’ Bar, and it was evident that the divide was pretty absolute. It probably has to be: Edale has been so thoroughly consumed by the Great Outdoors industry that the locals need to create and police their own corners, from a bar in the pub to a section of the vast village car park that was marked as ‘VILLAGE PARKING ONLY’. I camped the night in my van at the top of the car park (it’s not encouraged, of course) and was mildly amused to see that, even when the whole place was empty save for me and one other camper van, locals very pointedly made sure that they still used their designated spaces.

Immediately south of Edale is the ‘shivering mountain’ of Mam Tor, somewhere else that I’d wanted to visit for years. It’s almost my ultimate destination, as a spiritual pilgrimage to one of the great mother mountains of Britain, but also as a far more prosaic, positively spoddy one too, a chance to see our most spectacular abandoned modern highway. Mam Tor’s colourful nickname comes from its sheer precariousness as a vast pile of regularly shifting shale, just as it meets the firmer limestone to the south. Landslips are commonplace, which makes it a feat of towering optimism to have lain a trans-Peak road across its southern flank in 1810. This grew into the A625, a stretch of road notorious for its hairpin bends, unyielding gradient and harsh winter weather. Bits of the carriageway collapsed regularly and were patched up until the next slip, all causing terrible headaches for the Highways Agency and Derbyshire County Council. In February 1977, at the end of a wet winter that had itself followed a drought summer, the mountain