The sounds of curlews rippling overhead and stonechats’ song were instantly drowned out. Instead, all you could hear was the brutal revving of motorbikes as a caravan of offroad bikers – almost a default encounter in parts of this region at weekends – ground up the gritstone path, then minutes later came roaring down. They repeated it all twice. The inconvenience was intermittent as one after the other they forced us from the path. Yet the noise pollution, which was a violation of this whole landscape as well as surely the very meaning of a national park, was constant.
“You do your thing, mate, this is ours,” was their justification when confronted, as if it were a matter of individual liberty; as if each pedestrian or biker were an equal and thus free to find their own path to fulfilment in the Peak District. I wish we could pose the same issues to the stonechats and curlews.
