The national parks of Great Britain

Map of 12 locations in Great Britain

Britain's national parks are not wilderness and never were: the land inside the boundaries stays largely in private hands, people live and farm there, and the designation buys planning control rather than ownership. The sequence runs from the first wave of upland designations in 1951 under the 1949 Act to the South Downs in 2010, with Scotland's two parks arriving only after devolution. What follows is the hard outline of each one, designation year, area, high point and the authority that runs it, so the comparisons between them hold up.

Places in this collection

  • Loch Lomond and The Trossachs National Park — Scotland's first national park, created in 2002, spanning 1,865 square kilometres of the southern Highlands where the Lowland farmland give…
  • Cairngorms National Park — At 4,528 square kilometres this is the largest national park in the United Kingdom, designated in 2003 and extended into Perth and Kinross…
  • South Downs National Park — The newest of the British parks, announced in March 2009 and in effect from 31 March 2010, covering chalk downland across Hampshire and bot…
  • The Broads — Over sixty shallow lakes, the broads themselves, which are flooded medieval peat diggings rather than natural water, linked by the Yare, We…
  • Northumberland National Park — The northernmost English park, designated in 1956 and running up to the Scottish border across the Cheviot Hills, Kielder Forest and a long…
  • Exmoor — 693 square kilometres straddling the Devon and Somerset border, designated in 1954, with roughly 267 square kilometres of it moorland and h…
  • Yorkshire Dales — 2,178 square kilometres of limestone upland, river valleys and gritstone moor in the northern Pennines, designated in 1954. The field patte…
  • Pembrokeshire Coast National Park — The only UK national park designated primarily for coastal scenery, which shows in the shape of it: 620 square kilometres following 270 kil…
  • Dartmoor — 954 square kilometres of Devon granite, intruded as a batholith around 300 million years ago and rising to High Willhays at 621 metres, the…
  • Eryri (Snowdonia) — The first national park in Wales, designated in 1951 and covering 2,130 square kilometres from the coast to the summit of Snowdon at 1,085…
  • Lake District National Park — 2,362 square kilometres of northwest England containing every scrap of English ground above 914 metres, Scafell Pike at 978 metres among it…
  • Peak District — The first of the English parks, designated in 1951 in what was then mostly poor-quality agricultural upland, and still a working landscape…

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