THE North York Moors will feature on the Royal Mail's first Special Stamps issue of 2021, celebrating the 70th anniversary of the founding of Britain’s first National Parks.
Images of the stamp set, featureing ten of the 15 National Parks, are released today.
The ten pars featured are: Peak District (founded 1951); Lake District (1951); Snowdonia (1951); Dartmoor (1951); North York Moors (1952); The Broads (1989); New Forest (2005); South Downs (2010); Pembrokeshire Coast (1952); Loch Lomond and The Trossachs (2002).
The UK’s National Parks cover a breathtaking range of natural environments: from cold tundra to temperate rainforest, from gigantic sea cliffs to rolling chalk hills, from razor-sharp mountains to marshy wetlands.
They are also places where people have lived, worked, worshipped, farmed and traded for centuries, in ways that have shaped — and been shaped by — the surrounding environment. These landscapes are 15 unique combinations of human culture and natural history.
The National Parks were created as the outcome of decades of public effort to open up the countryside to ordinary people. 2021 marks the 70th anniversary of the founding of the UK’s first four National Parks: the Peak District, the Lake District, Dartmoor and Snowdonia.
Created a year later, the North York Moors National Park features endless seas of bright-purple moorland, steam trains puffing through sinuous valleys, sun-dappled waterfalls in lush woodland and the smell of fish and chips wafting through fishing villages in coastal cove.
The park — famously used as filming locations for Heartbeat and Harry Potter — evokes the atmosphere of a bygone era.
Walking, cycling and sightseeing are the order of the day, either in the valleys and moorland of the National Park’s interior or on its spectacular coastline — a sweep of high cliffs, hidden coves and rocky beaches, some of which are studded with Jurassic fossils and dinosaur footprints.
Today, most of us take for granted the ability to freely enjoy these landscapes, but it was not always so.
In the 19th century, the Industrial Revolution turned Britain into the world’s first predominantly urban nation, but people in towns and cities held on to visions of a ‘green and pleasant land’ and found ways of keeping links to the landscapes around them alive through hiking, cycling, rambling and climbing.
In the 1870s, the limited access ordinary people had to the countryside gave rise to the ‘right to roam’ movement. The 1932 mass trespass on Kinder Scout in the Peak District proved to be instrumental, galvanising public opinion after five of the young leaders were given prison sentences.
The UK’s National Parks, created in the same post-war rebuilding effort as the NHS, are one of the great legacies of this movement.
Fittingly, the first to be founded, in 1951, was the Peak District National Park. For all their diversity, the National Parks have one thing in common: they belong to all of us.
Philip Parker, Royal Mail, said: “Ten spectacular National Parks have been captured in stunning photographs that reflect their diversity and splendour. We are proud to be able to share the beauty of these parks on stamps at a time when so many of us have had our travel restricted.”
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