Volunteers save Peak District photo archive from landfill fate

When Sheila McHale saw old photographs and papers documenting the history of the Peak District National Park piled up in bin bags in a field, she knew she had to save them.

Sheila - a volunteer for the Peak District National Park Authority - rescued what she could eight years ago from the barn clear-out, and kept them safe in her shed, then loft, and later an airing cupboard.

In June 2024, she and other volunteers started methodically working through the material and a new home was found for the collection at the national park's head office in Bakewell.

The team has since added to the archive and is hoping to find a home for this treasure trove of information, with the aim of creating an online resource.

Sheila, who has worked with the national park for about 30 years, remembers the Saturday morning when a barn in Edale owned by the national park was cleared out and she went to help.

"It was misty, it was rainy and there were bin bags of items in the field all having to be disposed of," she told the BBC.

"I just grabbed what I could get hold of, knowing that a lot of it were reports written by full-time area rangers going back to the 60s, and reports from the weekend patrol rangers.

"I just knew there was stuff in there - with my history head on - that would really reflect society in those times.

"I didn't quite know what I was getting... so rescued what I could."

The Peak District was the first area to be designated as a national park in the UK - on 17 April 1951 - and led the way with the creation of what would become the country's first ranger service.

Sheila said it was at Edale where that first park ranger service was based. There was also a mountain rescue base there, as well as it being the start of the Pennine Way.

It meant there were documents and items in the barn "that would be of a real relevance informing what we are now", she said.

Sheila - who first worked as a volunteer for the Peak District National Park, then as a paid employee, and now a volunteer again after retiring - added: "We've got objects, we've got documents, we've got maps, we've got reports.

"Handwritten reports and typewritten reports, we've been wading through it all."

Sheila, a former research assistant for Tameside Museums Service and archivist, said the bags initially came back to her house in the Staffordshire moorlands, where she was living at the time with her "very understanding husband".

"It lived in my shed, then it moved up into the loft, and then when we moved house three years ago, the whole lot came with us," she said.

"There was an airing cupboard here, which then became the storage place for all the documents, files and papers, while we slowly started to wade through them.

"At the time the area ranger at Edale was also of a history background and she was really sort of captivated by it all.

"So she then helped me remove it from the house and I got the space back, and secured a little corner down at Aldern House, the headquarters of the national park.

"And we then got together with a couple of very interested volunteers and started wading through it and cataloging it."

They are a team of four core volunteers, including a history graduate, as well as others who help out, Sheila said.

"We've just got a bit of funding just for the storage boxes. That's it," she said.

"So it's all being done with enthusiasm, a lot of enthusiasm, for this national park and the ranger service that we care about, and with some decent skills as well."

She said some of the finds that stuck in her mind included maps and written records illustrating the work undertaken to set up the trails on the old railway lines.

Sheila, who now lives in Hepworth, West Yorkshire, added among the items they found was an old radio base set used for mountain rescue communication.

"Because obviously our comms were radios, aerials and handheld radios which were all a lot bigger then," she said.

"We've got photographs of people in the comms room, because the national park at Edale at the time was also the first place for mountain rescue communication."

Sheila said the collection had grown, with people donating logbooks about their ranger training, uniform, and sharing their stories, which have been written down and added to the archive.

The team has also been doing its own research, including on the construction of Ladybower Reservoir, as well as the fate of the villages of Ashopton and Derwent, which were flooded in the 1940s to create Ladybower Reservoir.

"It's turning into a really varied collection," Sheila said.

"But it's not just about the ranger service either, it's about the national park as a whole. It's just got quite big."

Sheila said the plan now was to preserve and digitise the collection.

"We're working on how people can access it like an online archive, as well as having a core of stuff that we can take and put up [in pop-up displays]," she said.

"We've two displays already that been quite successful, even with our sort of limited resources."

Hayden Bridgeman, ranger team manager at the national park, said it was "so grateful" the archive was saved, and described the work the volunteers were doing as "brilliant" and "important".

"It allows future generations to understand the history and the context of where we're at in the landscape and appreciate the landscape even more," she said.

"It highlights the amazing contribution that our volunteers make and we really couldn't do it without them."

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