If you stand on the ruins of the Jubilee Tower at the summit of Moel Famau on a clear morning you can see half of Wales and, if the light is kind, a sliver of Liverpool glittering beyond the Dee. It is a fine perch from which to consider ownership – not just of fields and fences, but of meaning and purpose, of communities and resources. For these hills, the Clwydian Range, are about to be redrawn once again on someone’s map of what Wales is for.
The Welsh Government has proposed a new Glyndŵr National Park, stretching from the dunes at Talacre to the surprisingly-lofty peaks of Y Berwynion above Llangollen. It would be the first new park in Wales for nearly seventy years, encompassing and reaching far beyond the current designation of ‘National Landscape’. Is it, as supporters claim, a “once-in-a-generation opportunity to protect nature, support communities, and shape a better future” – or is it going to be just another opportunity for distant, urban-dwelling strangers to have a say on what happens here?
Power from the Hills
The proposed boundary would enclose a familiar pattern for Wales: beautiful countryside pressed into service for national needs. Just beyond it, on the moorland above Llandrillo, stands the site of the proposed Gaerwen Wind Farm – seven turbines, each the height of a London tower block. They will keep the other turbines company – the 27 at Clocaenog, or the dozens of smaller sites scattered over the hills. A little further down the valley near Corwen, the heavily-contested Ynni Celyn project plans one of the world’s largest battery-storage farms. Different century, same instinct: when the towns need power, Wales provides the source.
It is an old story. The drowning of Capel Celyn in 1965 supplied Liverpool with drinking water but left a permanent scar on the Welsh conscience. “It was not a stretch of land that was flooded,” as Liz Saville Roberts later said, “but a community, a culture and a language.” A few miles west Trawsfynydd Nuclear Power Station came online in the same year – inside a National Park. Modernity trumped protection then, and its concrete hulk still sits beside the lake like a warning label on the idea of progress.
There’s a rhythm that beats in these hills, in the hearts of the Welsh people that call them home: proposal, consultation, protest, construction, regret. The resource may change – water, uranium, wind – but the choreography remains constant. The countryside is the battery that keeps the cities humming, the reservoir that feeds their pipes and now the venue for their recreation.
The People’s Landscape
Britain’s National Parks were meant to be a peace offering after the Second World War – the countryside returned to the people, in gratitude and hope. The National Parks and Access to the Countryside Act 1949 was drafted with almost romantic precision by John Dower, who wrote that parks should preserve beauty, provide access, protect wildlife, and “maintain established farming use.” They were to be working landscapes, not wildernesses fenced off from life. They borrowed the name from the US, but not the principle – this would be a project that respected the settled status of the land, to preserve the heritage of those places and those peoples.
But the post-war promise has blurred. There had been a trend of rural depopulation running back as far as the Industrial Revolution, but the mechanisation and modernisation of the first half of the Twentieth century accelerated it further. Those who had left the land, the population of rural workers who departed for the war effort or who had been made redundant by modern machinery, did not return. The smallholders and charcoal burners, the ditch diggers and the coppice-men began to leave and never returned. Not until their ‘job’ became a ‘heritage craft’ many decades later, often for display to tourists and practiced and revived by those born on the other side of the border.
When the nuclear power plant at Trawsfynydd was proposed, they ran the usual series of meetings and local representations. The campaign against was partly from those who abhorred anything from the new, nuclear age, partly from those who loved the park and wanted to avoid any further development, industrial or otherwise. The support came from a surprising angle – the locals. They were in fervent support of the proposed plant, desperate for jobs and replacement employment in the increasingly impoverished high valley they called home. On the eve of the 3-day enquiry in February 1958, placards sprang up around the village, with slogans reading “Pylons Before Poverty” and “Objectors You Are Not Welcome”. An interesting contrast to the iconic “Cofiwch Dryweryn” (Remember Treweryn) that was painted in protest of the drowning of Capel Celyn. Give us jobs, but don’t kill our villages – a sentiment that still echoes in every debate about who these landscapes are really for.
That shared ownership of these spaces continued, and the parks became something else: not a refuge of work, but a theatre of leisure. The parks had been offered to the people, and the people had come – millions of them – in boots and waterproofs, following signposts through land once measured in labour rather than miles. In that slow migration from plough to picnic, the meaning of public enjoyment quietly changed.
The National Parks of Britain are, in truth, a compromise written in soil: 90 per cent privately owned, 100 per cent publicly sentimental. They belong to everyone and to no-one. The land remains in the hands of farmers and estates, of charities and utility companies, yet every taxpayer has a moral shareholding. That is both their genius and their curse.
That compromise was later written into law as the Sandford Principle – the rule that when conservation and public enjoyment cannot both be satisfied, conservation must take precedence. A tidy piece of Westminster wording, but a quiet revolution all the same. The parks were founded so that the public might enjoy them; by the 1990s we had accepted that the public must sometimes be protected from their own enthusiasm. Sensible, perhaps, but it marked the moment when the working landscape became something closer to a national exhibit – preserved, managed, interpreted.
The New Empire
Some now argue that this moral share has swollen into something closer to possession. The majority – 84 per cent of Britons – live in towns or cities. From those centres of population come most of the visitors, voters and campaigners who shape rural policy and demand that their opinion on landscape management be the one adopted. It is they who decide, through government and social fashion, how the countryside should look and behave.
This imbalance has led a few sharp-tongued observers to talk of internal colonialism – the green and leafy places of Wales, Scotland and England as colonies of a metropolitan empire. It is not an entirely comfortable analogy, but one can see the temptation. The energy, the water, the weekend views, the small tumbledown houses in the village and the parking by the roadside: all exported. And now, when a new National Park is proposed, the locals are asked once more to surrender their agency in exchange for protection of a loftier ideal.
It might be instructive to flip the telescope. Imagine the same principle applied in reverse – the Rural Urban Park scheme, perhaps – in which farmers and foresters in Denbighshire or Derbyshire were given oversight of Brixton or Bradford. What could we bring to that urban landscape? Could we determine acceptable noise levels, street-tree densities or access to NHS dentists? If the hills of our national parks are sheepwrecked and need to be rewilded back to the forests of pre-history, then can we have a word about identikit houses springing up on greenfield sites, or the restoration of town centres back to their pre-war beauty? A difficult sell.
Yet that is roughly what happens in spirit when rural communities are told that their own hills, farms and livelihoods must adapt to outside expectations, to the theoretical wishes of every person who has an opinion on the designated green spaces of our islands.
A Question of Numbers
Democracy, however, counts heads not hectares. The arithmetic is unkind to those who live beyond the bypass, outside of the glow of the streetlight. If representation were measured by tons of food produced, or by metres of hedgerow restored the picture would look rather different. A sort of rural electoral college in which a shepherd’s vote might balance that of a tower block.
It may sound fanciful, but perhaps no more so than expecting sixteen per cent of the population to sustain the landscape, produce the food, restore the wildlife and host the playground for the other eighty-four – while having little say in how the land they manage is governed.
The truth is that ownership of the countryside was never simply about deeds and boundaries. It is about narrative ownership – who tells the story of the land, who defines its purpose. For decades that story has been written from the cities, by those who see the countryside as either idyll or issue, a playground or problematic – not as home.
The Consultation Continues
As I write, the Glyndŵr National Park consultation runs its course. Meetings are held in school halls; maps are unfolded; acronyms multiply. Some see promise – jobs, investment, a banner under which to rally pride. Others see a bureaucratic machine creeping up the valley.
I have yet to attend one, but friends have. Friends who will find their farms and forests under new management, with more stakeholders and more overwatch. A gamekeeper friend sent me the photos below, from the economic report (fully viewable online here).
Under the section pertaining to biodiversity that report notes, almost casually, that the park will offer “greater protection from pressures such as game-bird rearing.” When your livelihood appears in an official document as a pressure, it’s fair to wonder whose future is being protected.
Standing again on Moel Famau, facing the wind from the west and the Vale and my home below, the question lingers: Who are the National Parks for?
If the answer is everyone, then perhaps we should remember that “everyone” includes those who already live within the lines on the map – and they were here first.
