Life At The Edge Of The UK's First National Park

ONCE BARRED FROM COMMON PEOPLE, THE MOORLANDS OF THE PEAK DISTRICT NOW WELCOME WANDERERS LIKE ME-AN OUTSIDER SEARCHING FOR BELONGING IN A FARAWAY LAND

- EVA BADOLA

EACH SUMMER, SHE BEATS HER wings and leaves Africa, crossing continents to return to the wild moorlands of the Peak District. Locals call her the “Mountain Blackbird.” Scientists call her the ring ouzel. I simply see a companion- another migrant who found herself in this windswept corner of England.

I came from India to London, and then on to the quiet spa town of Buxton, my new home at the gateway to the Peak District. With its graceful Georgian crescents, steaming thermal water, and hills rolling in every direction, Buxton feels like a place suspended between history and wilderness. It is also the perfect base to explore a national park that changed the story of British access to nature.

WHERE FREEDOM FIRST TOOK ROOT

The Peak District may look serene today, but its past is shaped by resistance. Long before it became the UK's first national park, much of the moorland belonged to wealthy landlords. Fences, signs, and strict boundaries kept ordinary people out.

Yet these same moors—open, rugged, raw—were exactly the escape the working class needed during the gloom of the Great Depression in the 1930s. When people were barred from walking the hills, they protested. They trespassed. They demanded the right to roam. Their fight paved the way for a landmark moment in 1951, when the Peak District became Britain's first national park—a symbol of public freedom carved out of private land.

Learning this history made me realise how extraordinary it is that I, a quiet newcomer from another continent, could simply walk into landscapes once fiercely protected from outsiders. Still, the feeling of being a foreigner lingered—in the accent I carried, in the way I searched for belonging, in the unspoken loneliness of starting again in an unfamiliar place.