Inside Britain’s National Parks Review – TV That Will Make You Want to Enjoy Everything and Be Happy | National parks

I And I have to say that I was expecting Inside Britain’s National Parks to sound less like a school movie. The new documentary series looks at four of our 15 national parks and the people who live and work in them. So, you expect the usual barely convincing tourist advertisements – wall-to-wall shots of beautiful landscapes, scored with beautiful music, only interrupted by nice, nice interviews with nice, nice people. Escape from reality for an hour before you return to your life of stress, offices and mortgages instead of wandering the wilds of Wales and spotting new bird nesting sites or checking peatlands for solar dew, or… well, more about what we can do later. But this is too much.

We get a lot of the expected stuff but its traditionally soft edge is sharpened by a strangely dry script (although provided by Alex Jennings, who could normally talk to me in a burning car) that prevents you from disappearing into these wonderful worlds quite as well as you’d hope.

Still – good learning, right? So sit up straight and prepare to hear a lot of facts about the New Forest in the first episode, with its Pembrokeshire coastline, Dartmoor and Northumberland. Once you realign your expectations, you will enjoy it all a lot more.

The first national park, the Peak District, was established in 1951. The New Forest was one of the later parks. It’s called “new” but it’s actually old, a remnant of the wood that once covered southern England and northern France until the sea rose and diverted part of it into the Channel.

William the Conqueror turned our area into a hunting forest in 1079, and it still contains five of the six deer species that live wild in the UK: roe deer, red, fallow, sika and muntjac. (The missing men are Chinese water deer, in case you’re wondering. I don’t know if the Normans have something against them or Hampshire just isn’t wet enough, but a quick look online tells me a) that you can see them at Woburn Abbey and Whipsnade Zoo, both in Bedfordshire, and b) I can happily read about deer – both local and introduced! – For the rest of the day and maybe for the rest of my life. I’ll talk to my mortgage provider and see what they say about letting my bank account lie – ahem – for a while).

Timber from the New Forest was used to build the ships that fought at the Battle of Trafalgar.

The silvery blue butterfly can’t handle too much shade, so don’t let your open heath be overrun by conifers, which will colonize a spot overnight if you let them.

The facts are astonishing, even if the accent is strange. I’d happily watch a four-part series on the history of the New Forest alone (Dartmoor also because of the ponies, Northumberland because it has Hadrian’s Wall, and look, just do the rest of the fifteen parts while you’re at it, because the past is great and the future increasingly looks not so). But it’s the interviews with the people who live there that really make your heart sing.

There are the common people, who have rights and duties in the forests established a thousand years ago, including taking their animals out to graze there and rounding up the horses once a year for checks in a tradition known as “drifting,” and who still have disputes settled in the Verdiers’ Court. I’ll have a four-part series on that too, ta. There’s forest ranger Lee Knight, one of nine people who pretty much holds the job for life, running the place so everyone can thrive. He shows us the deer’s fallen antlers, and we are amazed that they grow in only three months. He pats a dead oak tree in the deepest part of the forest: it is at least 600 and perhaps 900 years old, but it will provide a home for bats and many other species for another two or three centuries. He smiles. “The time I spend here is small.” And there’s guitar maker Alex Potter, who uses local wood and his grandfather’s tools to make musical instruments. “You don’t know exactly what it’s going to sound like until the strings go on.”

Everyone you meet in this episode and all the others (from the reed cutters to the Cheviut goat herders, from the volunteers who make osprey nests to the maker of woolen shrouds) has an unmistakable aura of genuine contentment. They live a life of precision and patience, experiencing that rarest thing: the knowledge they create every day, their little patch of earth and time better than it was before. When you’re done searching for deer on Google, you can start your Google career changes. good luck.