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The North York Moors village of Goathland, scenic star of television's Heartbeat, now gets a million visitors a year thanks to its permanent presence in this amiable police drama. Production may have ceased but re-runs will go on forever.
The fans come in their urban coachloads from all parts of the country and they are not to everyone's liking. Bill Breakell, formerly the transport and tourism officer for the North York Moors National Park, says: "To many people, they are seen as the wrong sort of visitor. There's a preference for fewer, better educated more high-spending people."
Yet, he says, one of the main reasons the national parks were set up was as a place of recreation for these urban populations. The vision of John Dower, Yorkshire's national park pioneer, was that they should be "for people, especially young people of every class and kind. National Parks are not for any privileged or otherwise restricted section of the population."
If Dower was walking from his Kirkby Malham home this week, what sort of people would he meet and would he be concerned? Would he find many of the less well-off from the cities, single mums or any black or Asian people at all?
Bill Breakell's judgment is that the founders of our national parks would be disappointed at who was out and about in the parks. They believed with a passion that the parks should be places for the "health of the soul as well as the body".
Professor Ash Amin of Durham University headed a government study into the participation (or lack of it) of black and Asian people in our parks. His team took groups of them on two-day trips to the Peak District and North York Moors to find what was keeping them away.
Were there racist attitudes in the countryside or was it simply that the parks idyllic image of Englishness did not appeal to those who may come from non-English backgrounds? The Runnymede Trust weighed in, accusing national parks of ignoring ethnic minorities.
As a corrective, this year has seen the launch of a scheme called Mosaic. It's a three-year attempt to find community champions among the ethnic minorities with the idea of training them to organise and lead walks. This is already happening in Sheffield organised by the Peak Park and there are plans to extend this
to Kirklees.
Bill Breakell points to research in the early 1990s in the North York Moors which indicated the up-market profile of its visitors. The main group identified were over 45, read broadsheet newspapers, were in professional or managerial jobs or retired and many had relatively high incomes – 30,000 plus in 1994.
Bill traces the blame for this narrowing of visitor types back to the 1960s when bus and train services were cut or axed altogether. Except for the determined, or the organised rambling club members, access to the park mainly became the preserve of car owners, which was a more restricted section of society than it is now. Habits formed then remain with us today.
Bill Breakell backs this argument up with his own research following the launch of the highly-successful Moorsbus programme (which has its equivalents elsewhere). His data revealed how public transport was the key to bringing in a broader social mix. Young single parents, poorer retired couples, skilled manual workers and students made up a large proportion of bus-travelling visitors.
He also notes wryly, there were quite a lot of "middle class Guardian and Independent readers" using the bus because of their green concerns. He also surveyed car park users and this revealed a similar picture to the 1990s, even though car ownership had widened.
Bill's work indicates the physical barriers to wider national park access. But are there subtler, less obvious reasons which deter people coming?
Would the Heartbeat trippers still arrive in their droves if their journey also involved a three-mile walk?
Do they actually want fresh air in their lungs, wide vistas and the sound of singing birds – as the national park founders hoped, or even assumed, that they would?
It's not just a matter of class, money or education. We all know someone – usually several of them – for whom a choice between an outing to Harvey Nichols or a walk up Penyghent is no contest. Shopping is their thing, not mountains, and nothing is going to change them.
Bill Breakell reckons the national park movement has lost its campaigning vigour.
As the parks have evolved into what are, in many ways, local authorities, the keenness and enthusiasm of their early founders have been replaced by bureaucracy; with targets, business plans and best-value reviews .
He says: "For the first 30 years the parks were at the cutting edge of countryside and recreation issues. Then in the 1960s and 1970s two things happened.
"Firstly, their ideas were mainstreamed. County and city councils took them on board with the creation of country parks, trails and interpretative schemes – and they sometimes even went further.
"More critically, the national parks increasingly sought local authority status and became the preserve of professionals rather than passionate amateurs. Safe options replaced creativity."
In my own national park tours I've seen plenty to celebrate, from award-winning visitor centres, to public travel schemes and newly-created paths.
But perhaps these are the safe options and maybe a new sort of voluntary group is needed to get things moving again. One such group could be the John Muir Trust which campaigns for the creation of wilderness areas. In these increasingly crowded, noisy and stressful times we need places where nature is left in charge, where access is difficult and health and safety rules suspended. Is there room for them in Yorkshire's uplands?
Yvonne leads the way in diversity battle
Once a month, Yvonne Witter from Sheffield leads a walk in the Peak District National Park.
Nothing special about that you might think, but Yvonne is Afro-Caribbean and her party all come from ethnic minorities. Yvonne acknowledges that people do tend to look – even stare – at her party. She puts it down to surprise at what she admits is a rare phenomenon rather than any innate racism.
Not long ago, Yvonne herself was part of the great majority of the ethnic community who are missing from our great outdoors.
"I used to do quite a bit of walking – walking to work, into town and round the park and golf course at Darnall where I live.
"But I never walked out in the countryside. I didn't really know how you went about it."
She had seen leaflets about walking, listened to features about it on the radio and eventually thought she would give it a go. And having tried it, she decided she wanted to spread the message. She led walks with a friend and founded the Black Woman Keeping Active and Positively Healthy group. This was just as the absence of ethnic minorities from the national parks was starting to worry the authorities. They set up the Mosaic Project and Yvonne's friend knew one of the officers working on it and put her in touch.
Yvonne signed up for a course where she learned skills like map-reading. October 4, 2006, was her D-Day. Yvonne was on her own leading a party of 15 on a six-mile walk from Hathersage to Stanage Edge. She's been doing it ever since. Her reward is not merely seeing people enjoy themselves, but watching them develop the confidence to go on walks by themselves. A breezy 45-year-old, Yvonne says: "People often thank me and tell me they've never been out to the countryside before."
Will people have stopped staring in surprise in 20 years time?
"A lot sooner than that I hope."
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Saturday 26 May 2012
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