National Parks & Nature Reserves
-
The Lake District National Park Authority has backed a public consultation on requiring planning permission for temporary campsites. Here is what is changing, why, and what happens next.
-
Regularly named one of the best beaches in Europe, and you can’t drive to it. There’s no road, no café, no toilets and no lifeguard on the sand itself – just a half-mile walk over the cliffs from Stackpole Quay, through an 18th-century archway built for a family who once had this beach to themselves.
-
A 240-foot waterfall tumbling through a natural rock arch in a remote fold of the Berwyn Mountains, widely called the tallest waterfall in Wales. It probably isn’t, but it’s still one of the Seven Wonders of Wales, and the single-track road in is part of the experience.
-
A vast natural bowl gouged into the Surrey Hills, said to be where the Devil scooped up earth to hurl at Thor. A real murder happened on its rim in 1786, and Conan Doyle lived just over the ridge while writing Sherlock Holmes’s most famous case.
-
A row of Victorian coastguard cottages once stood safely inland here. Three have already been demolished, and the cliff is still retreating beneath the fourth. Birling Gap is one of the clearest places in Britain to watch the coastline change in real time, from a beach you reach by 50 steps.
-
Not really a forest at all, but rare heathland on a Sussex ridge, and the actual ground A.A. Milne mapped as the Hundred Acre Wood. Pooh Sticks Bridge, Galleon’s Lap and the Heffalump Trap are all real, walkable places, if you know where to look.
-
Britain’s largest protected wetland, and its only National Park where boats are the main way to get around. It looks entirely natural. It isn’t: every one of its lakes was dug by hand in the Middle Ages, for peat, and nobody realised until the 1950s.
-
The deepest river gorge in the South West: a roaring pothole called the Devil’s Cauldron, a 30-metre waterfall, rare temperate rainforest and a legend of outlaws. But the full riverside walk has gone, and half the gorge shuts for winter, so plan before you go.
-
A glen famous twice over: the road where Bond drove his Aston Martin in Skyfall, and the site of one of the most treacherous massacres in Scottish history, 300 years apart.
-
Wander one of Europe’s great sand dune systems, where rare fen orchids bloom above a Norman castle buried by the tide of sand — Kenfig National Nature Reserve is South Wales’ wildest corner.