I’m rethinking what it’s like to explore northern England, where nature and industry blend | Canada Voices

In a strong October wind, I clambered along the edge of the Pennine Hills, the mountain backbone of northern England, and found myself between pastoral and industrial worlds.

To my right, moorlands stretched out in a wind-scoured expanse. To my left, the land dropped sharply into a deep valley. In the distance, a white smokestack cut through the green. Underfoot, abandoned millstones lay half-sunk in the path, quarried long ago.

In this sweep of the Pennines’ rocky vertebrae, I realized I had been wrong about northern England.

Before my flight from Toronto’s Pearson Airport, I had pictured northern England as a place of stark contrasts: industrial Manchester, bleak and blackened by its past, set apart from quaint country villages tucked into valleys.

This contrast was, perhaps, painted for me by the authors I inherited with my British grandmother’s library. Her copies of Elizabeth Gaskell’s novels depicted an industrial, sooty existence, while the Brontë sisters described the natural, rugged beauty of this part of England. The country I discovered, however, was far less binary.

After landing in Manchester, fresh off a seven-hour red-eye, I dropped my bags and took a train straight to Little Moreton Hall, a timber-framed Tudor manor set in a rural landscape less than an hour outside of Manchester. I delighted in Little Moreton’s bulging, tilting walls and floors – a remnant of, seemingly, a simpler time.

But not far from the house, in the town of Congleton, I found myself on Mill Street and quickly clued into the region’s recent past. British towns reveal themselves in street names, if you know what to look for. Sure enough, around the bend of the road I found an 18th-century mill, sunk into a depression that suggested a long-dried river.

That night, I stayed in Manchester, which I had pictured squarely as an industrial city. After all, it was where the steam-powered engine was invented and weaving mills delivered both fortune and squalor for the city’s inhabitants.

Manchester is filled with red-brick factories from the late 19th century, many now converted into apartments. It also has its share of grand civic buildings – libraries, a city hall, covered markets – funded by the wealth of manufacturing titans during the Victorian era.

But I didn’t expect to find hints of the city’s pastoral past in the city centre: Chetham’s Library, the oldest free public reference library in the English-speaking world, sits at Manchester’s core. The sumptuous wood-panelled interior, dating to the 1400s, speaks to a medieval past that long predates the city’s industrial ascent.

The next day, I boarded a bus bound for Peak District National Park, the less-internationally-known little sibling of England’s Lake District, an hour outside of Manchester.

Through the window, the city’s grid dissolved into dry-stone walls that turned the green hills into a checkerboard. Nature had been intercepted by farmers long ago, who used these walls to delineate livestock grazing and mark a claim to their property. Yet these walls did not feel like a scar on nature, but rather part of it.

I was dropped off at my hotel with an hour until dinner. I decided to brave the drizzle and walk into the park toward nearby Chatsworth House, the historic seat of the Duke and Duchess of Devonshire, through open pastures.

Halfway there, huddled beneath my umbrella, I stopped to admire the view. I didn’t mind that my loafer was heel-deep in mud. The distant lights of Chatsworth House glowed through the haze, and I grinned into the supremely unbothered eyes of a well-wooled sheep. If sheep could roll their eyes, that one would have.

The next day, I learned that Chatsworth’s idyllic countryside surroundings are not, in fact, natural. They were the design of 18th-century landscape designer Lancelot (Capability) Brown, hired by the Devonshire family to impose his iconic “naturalistic” style – sweeping lawns and strategic tree-lined alleys – on their property.

In the days that followed, I saw how tourism, too, had left its commercial imprint on northern England. Buxton, a spa town in the Peak District and the northern answer to Bath, developed over centuries of visits from those seeking healing from its waters. The city’s regency architecture charmed me, as did seeing the house of one of my favourite authors, Vera Brittain, who penned the First World War memoir Testament of Youth.

And business in the town of Bakewell has long been buoyed by the city’s eponymous tart, and by the lesser-known Bakewell pudding. Listed in the Domesday Book of 1086, the town today is perfect for a wander with narrow streets converging around the medieval church.

Though the Peak District draws fewer visitors than the Lake District, luxury has taken hold here, too. During my stay at two hotels, I lounged by fireplaces with one of my grandmother’s books, dined in sumptuous restaurants with sweeping views, and enjoyed easy access to verdant parkland and historic towns.

Near the end of my Peak District stay, I wound between the Devonshire hills toward a hike on Stanage Edge, passing rivers, distant railroads and ancient quarries. Standing on the cliffside that day, I thought again of my grandmother’s books, and realized what I had missed.

Gaskell and the Brontës had given me two opposing visions of northern England, but the reality defies that simple split. Gaskell’s sooty towns existed within a broader pastoral landscape, just as the Brontë sisters’ wild moors and seemingly isolated villages, too, were connected to a network shaped by commerce.

Industry and nature have, together, co-created this landscape. It is as beautiful as it is complex.

If you go

Manchester is a two-hour train ride from London, or a direct flight from Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver.

I stayed at the Reach at Piccadilly, optimally located near Manchester’s Piccadilly train station, which features stylish rooms and breakfast options. Rooms from $140.

Higher Ground is a fine-dining restaurant listed in the top 100 restaurants in the U.K., serving an elevated menu of organic produce grown on the restaurant owner’s farm in Cheshire.

The Black Friar is a 19th-century establishment that blends Victorian charm and classic pub favourites (and a rotating meat pie offering) with contemporary flair.

I enjoyed exploring John Rylands Research Institute and Library, a 1900 masterpiece of Victorian Gothic architecture located in downtown Manchester and one of the most spectacular library settings in the U.K.

Chetham’s Library, the oldest free public reference library in the English-speaking world, is located near the city cathedral within a music school and is accessible on certain days when booked ahead.

The Peak District is about an hour from Manchester by train or bus, or 3.5 hours from London.

Two stately historic properties – Chatsworth House and Haddon Hall – are open to the public. Chatsworth, the ancestral seat of the Devonshire family, is a grand, classical 17th-century stately home. Haddon is one of England’s best-preserved medieval manors and dates to the 11th century.

In Bakewell, Derbyshire, stop at the Old Original Bakewell Pudding Shop to try the famous pudding, which differs from the frangipane-and-jam tart also named after the town.

The Cavendish Hotel at Baslow, set on Chatsworth Estate, has doorstep access to the historic house, garden and parkland. Here, I was offered a newspaper of my choice by the door in the morning and breakfasted with a full range of silver table accouterments, gazing out as mist rose off the hotel’s parklands. Rooms from $290.

Or consider Wildhive Callow Hall, where guests sleep in elegant rooms in its central Victorian building, or individual treehouse “hives” set into the treetops, and accessed by staff-driven golf carts. Here, guests dining at the hotel’s opulent in-house restaurant are treated to a “dressing drink,” a predinner cocktail that is among the hotel’s unique traditions. Rooms from $290.

The writer travelled as a guest of Visit Britain. It did not review or approve the story before publication.