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THE HUMAN LANDSCAPE Villages and Hamlets These are the most obviously man-made part of the Peak Park landscape. Most buildings are made of local building stone and reflect local building traditions. Settlements and buildings have changed with changing economic and social conditions, but the traditional materials and scale of the buildings have always been maintained. The National Park Authority encourages this to continue through the provision of guidelines on the design and materials of any new building or extension. There are Conservation Areas in many villages which have buildings of special historic or architectural interest. Normally the Conservation Area is in the heart of the village, but it may extend to the landscape around, if that has historic interest, such as the remains of medieval strip-fields. Trees too, are protected in Conservation Areas and cannot be cut down without permission from The National Park Authority. Enhancement projects in a Conservation Area might include paving, burying overhead telephone and electric wires, tree planting and restoring traditional features such as wells, pinfolds, lamp-posts, as well as providing grants for the repair and renovation of non-listed buildings.
There are over 2,700 Listed Buildings in the Peak Park, of special architectural or historic interest. Special care is applied to their conservation and grants are available from either The National Park Authority or English Heritage for their repair or restoration. Owners are encouraged to discuss their proposals for repair or restoration with The National Park Authority’s specialist architects. Each year the owners of over 50 historic buildings receive grants to help repair them in authentic materials. Archaeological Conservation Important areas of historic landscape can be found throughout the Peak District National Park. There are remains from the Neolithic age (e.g. Arbor Low and chambered tomb at Five Wells), Bronze Age (e.g. Stone circle and tomb on Stanton Moor), Iron Age (e.g. Hillfort at Mam Tor), Roman period (e.g. Navio fort at Brough) and many developments from the medieval period onwards. Lead mining has had a most significant effect on the landscape with mines along rakes (veins of lead ore), soughs (drainage channels), and smelting sites. Since 1978 The National Park Authority has been seeking to conserve sites which illustrate the history of the landscape particularly well including:- Big Moors - an extensive upland Bronze Age landscape; Chee Tor - a Romano-British settlement and field system; The Chelmorton field system - a fossilised medieval strip field; Roystone Grange - a valley where human activity can be traced back 10,000 years. Roman farm and field walls and a medieval monastic farm (which gave us the Grange name) are particularly interesting. There are altogether about 200 Scheduled Ancient Monuments (SAMs) in the Peak Park. Thousands of other monuments are listed in the Sites and Monuments Records, which grows longer whenever surveys are carried out.
Most of all, conservation in the Peak District National Park involves a partnership between the farmers and landowners, the National Park Authority and associated conservation organisations. |
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