I grew up in Stocksbridge, a small town in the Yorkshire Pennines between Sheffield and Manchester. Looking down into the valley, there were massive steel works, mines, coke ovens, blast furnaces, pipe works and rolling mills that polluted the air with fumes and smoke. The local river – the Little Don or Porter – was heavily contaminated close to its source. Slag and other wastes were dumped in the woodland downstream below the works. In the 1950s, our community was not alone in suffering from the effects of industrial pollution; indeed, the problem was widespread in South Yorkshire.

However, Stocksbridge had one important advantage not shared by many other towns. Looking down the valley the prospect could be depressing, but this was not the whole picture. Beyond the valley, the hills and valleys of the Peak District National Park came into view, offering some of the finest scenery in England, with farms, rough grazing, woodlands, moorlands managed for grouse shooting, and reservoirs that provided drinking water for Sheffield.

It was here, in an area of such contrasting land use, that I first considered the historical and ecological forces at work shaping the industrial landscapes and the moorland, woodlands and farmland of the National Park. In time, the scope of these reflections widened, for while recovering from some brief teenage illness, I first read Charles Darwin's Voyage of the Beagle (1839).