The most Elysian landscape in England
T. he lavish publicity material came in the shape of a glossy gatefold folder. Think a Supertramp double album, only this one didn't feature platforms and jump-suits but photos of granary barns and a farmhouse with pink climbing roses ascending the slate-caved porch. Hundreds of these folders were sitting, I knew, in a neat stack in the office of Stags estate agents in Dulverton, waiting to be mailed to the thousands of punters also keen to grab their own piece of heaven in Exmoor National Park.
In a week's time, I had ascertained from the Stags estate agent James Green, the featured property, and a large picture of its river frontage along the Exe Valley, would be in Country Life. Unless we moved fast, this period farmhouse, with its bread ovens and inglenooks and classic Sixties extension clad in finest asbestos, could be out of reach for ever.
I have lived on Exmoor, where my grandfather bought a hill sheep farm in 1949, all my life. Now we have a property in the most Elysian landscape in England. I am aware of the responsibility that comes with such a privilege (if your land is part of a certain scheme, for example, you are expected to maintain the outbuildings and mend gates when sluttish human nature dictates they should be left to moulder). And I love it to the point where I simply refuse to go anywhere else. 'I'd love to show you the Lake District,' my husband, who is a new convert to the charms of the south-west, sometimes says, or, 'Have you ever been to PoitouCharentes? It's supposed to be wonderful,' but I pretend not to have heard him, and every half-term and every holiday we go there. So everything I say in this piece, which is supposed to be about this year's 50th birthday of Exmoor National Park, the lucky 11,000 people who live in 4,500 dwellings within its boundaries, and how they rub up against the parks, mission and mandate to entertain and educate (and toilet) as many visitors to the area as possible, must be viewed through the prism of the most naked nimbyism.
Along with most landowners I know, for us the great point of living here is to walk or ride to the top of a hill, 1,500 feet above sea level, look around us, and count the number of houses you can see in every direction on one hand. Of course, there might be the occasional walker in head-to-toe cagoule with Karrimor backpack and plastic-encased map blotting the landscape, but on the whole Exmoor is deliciously empty off-season.
During the holidays, though, it's a different story, and this is when the owners of private property can sometimes feel that they are living in a public park. This slight themepark impression is also fostered by the cairns sited at the boundaries to the park (the smallest in England at 12 miles by 20 miles). These cairns, decorated with stags' heads, 'welcome' the millions who pour into the park in peak season — months when residents feel that what Dr Nigel Stone, the Park's effective chairman, calls the 'benefits of the designation' are less palpable.
Following the outbreak of foot-andmouth, the Park has been working overtime to get more and more visitors on to Exmoor, on the basis that farmers, who have been encouraged financially and otherwise to diversify, need punters if they are going to afford to stay put and manage the landscape: which is, as everyone with an interest in tourism always likes to tell you, a manmade, 'living landscape' to start with, so no complaints, please, about overdevelopment.
So a friend of mine who owns a part of the moor near Landacre Bridge at Withypool, one of the tourist hotspots, is reconciled to the way that trippers and picnickers with those turf-scorching disposable barbies overrun her property throughout the summer; but pretty steamed up about the way that recreational 4x4s and quad bikes noisily tear up the ancient bridleways on her land, all in the name of 'enjoyment' of the park. 'I just close my eyes to it,' she says, 'and think, well, where else are people supposed to go? But I'm terrified that the Park is going to put up a public loo at the riverbank, or something. You're not allowed to chop down a gorse bush on your own land without permission,' she says, 'and yet no one dares stand up to the trail riders or bikers, because they are reluctant to enter into conflict with people who come to enjoy the moor.'
There is a sense, some are noting, of creeping overmanagement; and anxiety that the national park designation is less certain to protect residents from new development than it was (there is a housing policy of new build based on local need in the local plan). Anxiety has not been allayed one jot by the creation of a new carpark (the third — count 'em) and a plan for a visitors' centre at the site of the mediaeval clapper bridge at Tarr Steps.
In one of the few remaining oases of the country where the night sky is not polluted by artificial light, this new development has been greeted with disbelief: a neon-lit carpark, new hotel and centre, all illuminated by floodlight — including a beam angled over the steps across the Bade — on a 24hour basis, in the heart of a river valley with ancient sessile woodlands that has ironically just been christened a 'world nature' site. 'It's becoming like the long-term carpark at Heathrow,' one local commented.
And then there is the business of footpaths, the preserve of the county councils. Just to fill you in, it has been decided by Defra that any stream that at any point of the year rises to a level of 20cm or more has to have a footbridge over it. 'So we're getting these ditsy little bridges everywhere,' says a landowner at Molland. 'with two handrails apiece, some as long as seven metres, when people who come to Exmoor expect to get their feet wet and muddy anyway. But it's not the Park's people's fault. I can't stand it when people moan about them, because the Park takes endless trouble and people do love to moan, don't they?'
But the moaning's inevitable, of course. Like all national parks, Exmoor is tasked with two entirely contradictory functions. One is to preserve and enhance natural beauty (which means less is more) and the other is to encourage open-air recreation and the enjoyment of said beauty (which means the more tourists the merrier).
So, speaking as one who believes that when it comes to Exmoor there should be no such thing as progress, the people at ENP are doing a darn fine job, and I offer them all many congratulations for their first half-century.
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