Peak District

The Peak District was Britain's first national park — designated 17 April 1951 — and it earned the precedence politically: ringed by Manchester, Sheffield and the mill towns, with a third of England's population within an hour's drive, this was where the pressure between industrial cities and locked-up moorland finally broke. On 24 April 1932 several hundred ramblers walked deliberately onto the grouse moor of Kinder Scout in the mass trespass; five went to prison, public opinion turned, and the line runs straight from that afternoon to the 1949 national parks act and the modern right to roam. The Pennine Way, Britain's first long-distance trail, opens appropriately at Edale under Kinder's flank, and its first miles cross the very ground the trespassers claimed.

The park is really two interleaved countries named for their rock. The Dark Peak is millstone grit: peat plateaus at 600 metres on Kinder and Bleaklow, and the miles-long escarpments — Stanage above all — whose rough brown edges are one of world climbing's holy places, the crucible where Joe Brown and Don Whillans rewrote the sport's standards in the 1950s. The White Peak, inside the gritstone horseshoe, is Carboniferous limestone: a green plateau sliced by sudden dales — Dovedale with its stepping stones and spires, Lathkill's clear water, the Wye's sequence under the Monsal Trail viaducts — and hollow underneath, from the show caverns of Castleton (source of Blue John, a banded fluorspar found nowhere else on earth) to Titan, the deepest natural shaft in Britain. Between the two personalities stands Mam Tor, the "shivering mountain", whose landslipping face carried away the trans-Pennine road in stages until engineers surrendered in 1979.

It is also a deeply inhabited park. Chatsworth, the Devonshires' palace in its Capability Brown park, and medieval Haddon Hall anchor the Derwent and Wye; Eyam holds the plague story of 1665–66, when the village quarantined itself and buried perhaps a third of its people; the wells of Tissington and a dozen other villages are still "dressed" with flower-petal mosaics each summer, a custom nowhere else in England. The Derwent dams add a darker modern note — 617 Squadron practised the Dambusters raid over Ladybower's predecessors, and drought summers still expose the drowned village of Derwent beneath the reservoir.

What's worth knowing before you go

Access is the park's superpower: the Hope Valley line between Manchester and Sheffield stops at Edale, Hope and Hathersage — walkers' platforms in the middle of the hills — and Buxton and Matlock have their own branches, so this is the English park to do entirely by train. The corollary is crowds: Dovedale and Mam Tor on a fine Sunday are processional, while the Staffordshire moorlands around the Roaches and Lud's Church — a mossy chasm that medievalists argue is the Green Chapel of Sir Gawain — absorb people without trace. The cyclists' secret is the trio of former railways (Monsal, Tissington, High Peak trails), level gravel through tunnel and viaduct scenery; the climbers' rite is a first gritstone jamming crack at Stanage, taped hands recommended; and the Bakewell pudding — never "tart" in Bakewell — is the required calorie stop.