Northumberland: England’s Emptiest National Park, Its Darkest Skies, and a Roman Wall That Has Done More for Tourism Than Two Millennia of Marketing HEXHAM — Northumberland National Park — 1,049 square kilometres of moorland, ancient forest, Roman frontier, and sky — is England’s least visited national park and, by numerous measures, its most spectacular. It contains fewer people per square kilometre than almost anywhere else in England, more stars per…
Brecon Beacons: Where the SAS Does Its Training, the Waterfalls Are Spectacular, and Someone Just Changed the Name to Bannau Brycheiniog BRECON — The Brecon Beacons National Park, the highest land in southern Britain and training ground of choice for the SAS, the Royal Marines, and everyone who has ever thought that a sponsored walk sounded straightforward, made headlines in 2023 by officially renaming itself Bannau Brycheiniog — which is…
New Forest: Ancient Royal Hunting Ground, Modern Tourist Attraction, Permanent Argument About Whether the Ponies Have Right of Way LYNDHURST — The New Forest National Park — which is neither particularly new (created by William the Conqueror in 1079, so barely broken in) nor strictly a forest in the modern sense — represents one of the most extraordinary survivals of medieval land management in Europe: an ancient system of common…
Loch Lomond: Scotland’s Most Famous Loch, Its Most Photographed Shoreline, and the One Place You Can Be in Glasgow in Twenty Minutes But Feel Like You’re in Another Country BALLOCH — Loch Lomond and The Trossachs National Park — Scotland’s first national park, established in 2002, and the one most easily reached by people who do not have a car but do have an Abellio ScotRail ticket — is one…
Pembrokeshire Coast: Britain’s Only Coastal National Park Has Atlantic Seals, Medieval Castles, and a Coastline So Dramatic It Makes the Riviera Look Like It’s Not Trying ST DAVID’S — Pembrokeshire Coast National Park is Britain’s only exclusively coastal national park — 621 square kilometres of west Wales cliff, cove, estuary, and island that wraps around a peninsula historically called “the Land’s End of Wales” and which contains, by any objective…
Snowdonia: Wales’s Highest Mountain Has a Train to the Top, a Café, and More Visitors per Year Than the Population of Swansea BETWS-Y-COED — Snowdonia National Park — or Eryri, as the Welsh name rightly insists on being used since a 2022 renaming that was either a long-overdue reclamation of Welsh heritage or a minor inconvenience to the tourism literature, depending on who you ask and how they feel about…
Cairngorms: Britain’s Biggest National Park Contains an Arctic Plateau, Wild Reindeer, and a Ski Resort That Argues With the Snow Every Year AVIEMORE — The Cairngorms National Park, covering 4,528 square kilometres of the Scottish Highlands and being therefore nearly twice the size of the Lake District and considerably more likely to kill you, is Britain’s largest national park and one of the most important wild landscapes in Europe. It…
The Broads: Britain’s Flattest National Park, Its Windiest Sailing Destination, and the Medieval Peat Digging That Accidentally Became a Landscape NORWICH — The Broads, Britain’s largest protected wetland and its only national park that is largely underwater, is a landscape created almost entirely by human activity — specifically, the medieval extraction of peat for fuel between the ninth and fourteenth centuries, leaving behind a series of flooded excavations that nature…
