Spurred on by extreme consumption of BBC detective dramas, I was examining the geography of Yorkshire when I realized it was much larger and much greener than I thought. So green, in fact, I was taken aback. Four what appear to be national parks or their near equivalent are contiguous – the Forest of Bowland, Yorkshire Dales National Park, the Lake District, and the North Pennines Area of Outstanding National Beauty – take up an enormous part of not just Yorkshire, but in fact of England. Looking at the roughly clover-shaped splotch of green on Google Maps, I felt I needed to better understand the scale of what I was looking at. It being a vacation day, I wasted far too much time on in…
The total size of the four areas in question is 2,835 (or so) square miles – for comparison, Yellowstone National Park is about 3,500 square miles, while Yosemite is around 1,200 square miles. But what else could I do to make a like-to-like comparison, given the two American parks I cite are in a country that is so much bigger than the UK? Well, the total area of England, Scotland, and Wales is 89,225 square miles – I exclude Northern Ireland as it’s a different body of land. So the four parks in Yorkshire are 3.2% of the total land area of those three nations. Their total population is 61 million.
Using different states in the northeastern United States (the most densely populated part) I cobbled together an area of roughly the same population. Vermont, New Hampshire, New York, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Delaware, and Maryland together have a population of 62 million, and an area of 160,000 square miles. The New World – even the oldest, densest parts just have more space than the Old World! 3.2% of 160,000 square miles gives us an area of 5,100 square miles. That’s a park the size of Death Valley (the largest national park in the contiguous United States) planted square in the middle of the the Northeast! Using the highly scientific method of holding my thumb over my computer screen for reference, that’s a green area stretching from New York City to Wilmington, Delaware, and wide enough to encompass Philadelphia and Allentown.
So nice job, Yorkshiremen and Brits writ large! Having such a singular swath of green across such a densely populated country is a worthy achievement, and I for one have added it to my list of future adventures.
smq.world 