What is a National Park?

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What is a National Park?

A national park is a large area of land that is protected by law to benefit the nation.  About 10% of England and Wales has been turned into national park land.  (See Map A)

How The National Parks Began

100 years of yesterdays gone by many people worked in dairy factories 6 days a week, they looked forward to Sunday when they could escape to the countryside.

But in the countryside, landowners were busy trying to stop visitors from entering, this made the city folk upset, big demonstrations were set up in the cities to fight for fair rights of the use of the countryside.

In 1949 the government passed laws allowing the setting up of National Parks, to make sure everyone had equal access to the countryside.  The first national park was the Peak District National Park in 1951.  A National Park Authority manages every National Park.


Who Owns National Parks?

A honey pot national park, like the Peak District is one which is more popular, and has more visitors that other national parks.

We went to Castleton to prove the hypothesis that there are more facilities than are needed for the local inhabitants.  To do this we needed to investigate the following ideas:

A:  The environment in and around Castleton is going to be attractive to visitors from a wide area.  We needed to find out local attractions, and features of Castleton that make it attractive and why; and to find out how broad the wide area that people came from was.

B:  Accessibility of a Honey Pot area, like Castleton will be good (see map.  We evaluated the accessibility of getting to the Peak District and the accessibility within, to get to Castleton.

C:  The emphasis on facilities is aimed towards visitors more than resisidents.  We found out about the amount of facilities around the village, and their nature, and then we found out about the nature and amount of facilities in Castleton.  

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To prove or disprove these ideas we took with us:

  • An attractiveness survey – this is a map of the town, split into boxes.  For each box we marked ten points about what features the box contained, 1-3 (3 being the best) and then added them all together to give a total mark.

  • A questionnaire – we went around asking locals and tourists alike: where they came from, how long it took them what they were going to do today etc

  • We drew land sketches of the local geology and of Mam Tor and took photographs ...

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