Simon Parker: 'I explored all 15 national parks - and the Yorkshire Dales is one of the most underrated landscapes in the UK'

“I think it's very easy to assume that we live in quite a densely populated country, quite a busy place, quite a – dare I say it - boring country,” the author and filmmaker reflects. “But as someone who is desperate to try to find wide open spaces, wild places, a sense of wilderness, I wanted to try and find that in the United Kingdom.”

To a certain extent, he did. “We have 15 national parks. And while some of them are pretty benign, others are pretty wild and extreme…Out in the middle of the North York Moors, for example, there is a genuine sense of wilderness...There are some really stunning landscapes in this country. You just have to make an effort to go out and see them.”

Over the years, Parker has paraglided solo through the Andes, hiked Bali’s highest volcanoes, driven a rickshaw the length of India and cycled more than 4,000 miles across the USA. But with a young baby to care for, his latest adventure needed to be one much closer to home.

Parker realised he knew more about national park systems around the world than he did about the one in the UK and the 75th anniversary this year of the founding of the first national park – the Peak District – provided an in-road to exploring all 15, a journey he covers in his latest book The Wild Road Home: Fifteen National Parks, One Remarkable Adventure.

His favourite was the Yorkshire Dales. “I'd just spent several days exploring the Lake District and my big takeaway from the Lake District was just how busy it was - lots of tourists all vying for the same roads and attractions. But then I went to the Yorkshire Dales and it just felt refreshingly open and filled with space. Not only are the Yorkshire Dales beautiful, they are just these wonderful undulating landscapes, but they're so green. They're fresh. They feel incredibly bucolic and pastoral. I think they are probably one of the most underrated landscapes in the United Kingdom for sure.”

The North York Moors, meanwhile, offered him the “greatest sense of wilderness that you find in England”. Whilst there, he spent time in Hawnby, the first place in England to be accredited as a Dark Skies Friendly Community after changing its lighting to to safeguard its night sky and cut unnecessary light pollution. “It was the only place in the UK that I've genuinely seen the Milky Way above us,” Parker says. “And it's quite a staggering thing to think that Yorkshire is often quite a busy and populous county, but there are still corners of it where you can really feel an incredible sense of wonder for nature and for space and this sense of just feeling really rather small in this enormous galaxy.”

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Each of the national parks offered their own beauty and surprises, but all also revealed the challenges of making space for nature on a densely populated island. Parker’s days within the parks could be idyllic or enraging, he says. He explored wild and remote moors and mountain tops but also got stuck in plenty of holiday traffic. “Travelling around these places, you soon realise just how fragile these ecosystems are,” he notes.

“Although they feel wild in places, I would say probably one of the biggest takeaways from this journey and from this new book is that these so-called wild landscapes have been quite heavily cultivated over the course of hundreds of years. The national park system in the UK is very unique in the sense that there are hundreds of thousands of people living, working and farming within them and that creates a very nuanced and sometimes quite fraught relationship between all of the stakeholders.

"Unlike, for example, a national park system that you might find in Africa or in the United States which is federally owned and protected for wildlife, in the United Kingdom they are heavily grazed by sheep, they are used for grouse and pheasant shooting, they are heavily privately owned…They've become these playgrounds for human beings.”

Parker, who also runs a video production company for tourist destinations and travel brands, and is working on films for the North York Moors National Park Authority, hopes the book gets people thinking more about public right of way, the right to roam and free access to the countryside.

“Ultimately, this is a book about the national parks, but it's probably less about the landscapes and more about the people that live within them and how those people continue to shape these so-called national landscapes,” he says. “I'd like people to read this book and perhaps discover and almost question why we have national parks and how they came to be. They were designed as places where ordinary people could have access to the countryside.”

Exploring them has opened Parker’s eyes to adventuring closer to home, at least whilst his daughter his young. “I've done three books now which have taken me away from home a lot and I’ve spent 10 to 15 years travelling to well over half the countries in the world,” he reflects. “But now I feel much more comfortable at home and I think actually this book and discovering what is available in the UK has really helped me quell my wanderlust...I don't feel the burning desire to get as far away from this country as possible. I'm now desperate to explore what I have on my own doorstep, but with my daughter and my wife too.”

- Simon Parker’s The Wild Road Home – Fifteen National Parks, One Remarkable Adventure, published by Duckworth Books, is out now.