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Authored by Steve Watson via Modernity News,

Picture a “whites only” ramble through the Peak District. The press would treat it as a national emergency. Now take look at what is already happening there, with official blessing.

The National Trust has spent years partnering with Muslim Hikers for Ramadan walks and overnight retreats at Ilam Park. The charity’s own channel promotes Enjoy the beautiful Peak District on a Ramadan walk with the Muslim Hikers.

The weekend features a guided hike, congregational prayers, iftar, night prayers and suhoor, with YHA Ilam Hall booked exclusively for the group on National Trust land.

That is sold as inclusion. Reverse the identity and it becomes a hate incident.

Muslim Hikers founder Haroon Mota states “It’s about showing our communities that these places are for us too.”

Other groups drop even that pretence. Peaks of Colour calls itself “a Peak District-based walking club by and for people of colour only.” Founder Evie Muir says the point is to “reclaim space in the outdoors.”

Allies can donate, but they cannot join the walk.

Another group called Wanderers of Colour ran a Peak District climbing festival this August billed as “Europe’s only climbing festival by and for Black and people of colour.”

A whites-only weekend on the same gritstone would not get a listings write-up. It would get a police inquiry.

Then there is this development:

A 2022 DEFRA report complained that rural facilities served “white English culture,” including “traditional pubs, which have limited food options and cater to people who have a drinking culture.”

Muslims from Pakistani and Bangladeshi backgrounds, it said, felt unwelcome because of it. The approved solution is not adaptation. It is a rewritten menu.

National Trust director-general Hilary McGrady spelled out the official line on LBC in March. Ethnic minorities, she said, do not feel the countryside is “a place for them.”

“They don’t necessarily know ‘what am I meant to wear, how do I behave? What’s a countryside code? I’ve never heard of it’.”

The research, she added, “comes back really clearly to say they don’t. So we accept that and we have to respond… because the National Trust is here for everyone.”

Britain’s national parks are already open to anyone who can stay on the path. The Trust’s answer is still to treat the existing rural culture as the problem, while hosting Ramadan residentials at Ilam Hall.

Julian Glover’s 2019 Defra review called national parks “an exclusive, mainly white, mainly middle-class club” and a “‘white’ environment” at risk of becoming “irrelevant to the country that actually exists.”

National Landscapes fell in behind it. The Chilterns promised outreach to Muslims from Luton and marketing in “community languages.” Malvern Hills said “most white English users value the solitude” while “ethnic minority people” prefer “social company.”

Nidderdale pledged a “more diverse cultural interpretation of the countryside.” The Telegraph’s February headline did not distort the papers. It was a drive to make the countryside “less white.”

In 2024 Wildlife and Countryside Link told an all-party parliamentary group: “Cultural barriers reflect that in the UK, it is White British cultural values that have been embedded into the design and management of green spaces.”

It added that “racist colonial legacies continue to frame nature in the UK as a ‘white space’.”

That is the climate in which a people-of-colour-only club is called community and a whites-only ramble would be called extremism.

The Guardian writer John Harris recently praised Peak District paths where a common sight is “women in their 20s wearing hijabs picnicked on giant rocks.” Country walking, he wrote, had been “one of the most monoculturally white pursuits there is.” The new scene is, according to Harris, “a wonderful rejection of the right’s monotone vision of England.”

While the reports fuss over clothing, dogs and menus, the British countryside itself is increasingly being used as a dump.

In November a fly-tip on the River Cherwell near Kidlington piled waste an estimated 20 feet deep and 500 feet long.

In January farmer Katie Davies found a river of rubbish down Bwlch Mountain in Treorchy, visible for miles. “I’m extremely frustrated and upset,” she told the BBC. “It’s just devastating.” The mess “keeps me up at night.”

Natural Resources Wales called fly-tipping “a serious crime.” Over 70 percent of incidents involve household waste moved by unlicensed carriers.

The Kinder Scout trespassers wanted the right to roam. The new version wants branded weekends, race-gated clubs, faith residentials on Trust land, and a countryside redesigned because Defra decided “white English culture” was the defect.

The hills were not meant to be carved up by identity. Octavia Hill, a National Trust founder, wrote that “the need of quiet, the need of air and… the sight of sky and of things growing seem human needs, common to all.” Common to all is the opposite of a programme that sorts walkers by race and creed, then calls the native remainder colonial.

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