Health risk to parks

Why don't GPs prescribe a walk in the Yorkshire Dales or North York Moors National Parks rather than a course of pills when their patients complain of stress? The question is posed by Carl Lis. We are sitting in the community centre at Ingleton on an autumn day that is swept by savage showers. Yet as we talk, the car park outside is filling up, and walkers are smiling and chatting as they pull on boots ready to climb Ingleborough.

"What value can you place on the smiling faces on those walkers out there," Carl goes on. "What could be better for health and well-being than enjoying the peace and tranquillity of the Three Peaks or going out in the Lakes or the North York Moors? I'd really love to see the benefits of these places recognised in terms of the country's health agenda."

Yet in a political climate where every service has to prove its worth, no official value is placed on the National Parks for their role in preventive medicine. And while – quite rightly – a front-line service like the NHS has been ring-fenced in the spending review, the National Parks' finances are about to take a hammering.

Which makes this a highly stressful time for Carl, although he confesses with a slight rueful tone that he isn't a walker. His interest lies in the fact that he's chairman of the Yorkshire Dales National Park Authority, and also the recently appointed chair of something called UKANPA, the organisation that represents all of the UK's 15 national parks.

The value of the National Parks is under official scrutiny. In early December they will learn what their share is of the 29 per cent spending cut suffered by their funding department, the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs. If that level of cut is handed down, Carl says, it will hit the Yorkshire Dales National Park hard.

Of its annual budget of 5.2m about 70 per cent goes on wages for the National Park's 142 employees – people like rangers, staff at the five National Park Centres, planning officers and others with specialist briefs like Dales wildlife and archeology.

"Such a cut would be disastrous for us, to be truthful," he says. "There will have to be some very tough decisions. But I think we'll have to be awfully careful that we don't throw the baby out with the bathwater."

By that he means that the core purposes of the National Park should not be allowed to suffer. These include preserving the unique landscape of the limestone Dales and helping to maintain a strong local economy for residents, especially finding affordable housing in areas where young people have been priced out of the market.

A major challenge will be what to do about maintaining the several thousand kilometres of footpaths. Officially, the work is the responsibility of North Yorkshire County Council, as highway authority, but it has always been carried out by the National Park Authority with a 50,000 contribution from the council, although the actual cost is 800,000.

Next year, however, the National Park Authority will get not one penny towards footpath costs.

"We view a footpath on Ingleborough as a primary concern, even though it's not our responsibility. It's as much about protecting the landscape as it is about access, because if paths are not properly maintained they become eyesores. People walk round muddy parts and the path spreads across the fellside. One of them actually became 500 metres wide. So we can't just put our hands up and say, 'we can't afford to repair them any more'."

The spending cuts will bring a double whammy, with money for numerous specialist projects – field barn restoration is an example – either no longer available or reduced because of cuts suffered by funding organisations like Natural England and Regional Development Agencies.

And yet the work of National Parks still must go on. Preserving their landscapes for future generations has to remain top priority, despite challenges from many directions, most recently wind farm applications on the Lakes-Dales border and the suggestion that nuclear waste might have to be buried in the Lake District National Park.

Some of the biggest controversies in the Yorkshire Dales National Park's 50-plus years of existence has been over the impact of quarrying.

For many people who live near the large extraction sites in Wharfedale, Ribblesdale and Ingleton, the issue has been a no-brainer – quarries equal jobs. And there have been quarries in the Dales for centuries.

But to outsiders, those who come from the towns and cities with chocolate box images of what the Yorkshire Dales should look like, the gaping holes have seemed like desecration of the landscape and alien to the founding principles of National Parks.

Carl spent 40 years in the quarrying industry and for quarter of a century he was manager of Ingleton Quarry. During his time there his company considered opening a huge new quarry in the 1980s. At that time, one of the hottest environmental issues in Europe was acid rain.

Coal-burning power stations pumped sulphur dioxide out of their chimneys, and this reacted with the water in clouds to produce acid, which then fell as rain hundreds of miles away.

UK power stations were blamed for making sterile many lakes and forests in Scandinavia.

Technology to solve the problem was developed using high-grade limestone to de-sulphurise the flue gases and limestone on land owned by Hansons at Ribblehead appeared to hold the key.

"We sent samples of Ribblehead's limestone to Japan for analysis and the answer came back that it was particularly high quality, one of the top two limestones in the country for desulphurisation. Potentially the quarry at Ribblehead

had a 240m-ton deposit of limestone

and if the decision had been to open it – to put it in perspective – it could have resulted in the Three Peaks Walk becoming the Two-and-a-half Peaks Walk. It was that big."

In the end, the decision was taken that it wouldn't open and the site in fact was handed over to English Nature – forerunner of Natural England – as a wildlife reserve.

Carl doesn't take the credit for this himself, saying it was the quarry owners, Hanson Aggregates', decision. But he likes to tell this story when people accuse quarries of being all about "rape and pillage of the Dales" and not interested in the landscape.

In fact, it was through his dealings with the National Park Authority over quarrying, he says, that he "got to love" what it was doing.

"I learned to respect the idea that we have only got a short time to limit how much damage we do on the planet. Of course, the fact is we need stone to make our roads safe – the stone at Ingleton Quarry for example exhibits good skid resistance properties when used to surface our roads and motorways – but while accepting that I realised it was important to limit the impact."

But the impact of the spending cuts, he says, may well be harder to limit.

"I suppose one thought about the cuts that are about to hit us might be that, if we can no longer afford to do a lot of work, then people will notice that.

"And they'll appreciate what we were doing a bit more. They'll suddenly miss it..."

He stops to consider what he's just said.

"No, on second thoughts, I'd rather not have to go to those lengths for the impact of what we do as a National Park to be fully appreciated."

YP MAG 20/11/10