The Peak District National Park boundary starts, at its closest point, approximately six miles from Sheffield city centre. On a good day, with a car and a light traffic flow, you can be standing on Stanage Edge – 1,500 feet above sea level, looking across the Hope Valley to Mam Tor and Kinder Scout – within twenty minutes of leaving your front door in Crookes or Nether Edge. This is not something most cities in the world can say and it shapes Sheffield’s character in ways that are easy to understate because they’re so embedded in daily life.

The Peak District divides into two quite different landscapes. The Dark Peak – the northern and eastern edges, the gritstone moors, the edges – is the Sheffield Peak. Stanage Edge, Burbage, the Eastern Moors, the Hope Valley: these are the places that Sheffield people use as a matter of routine. The landscape is austere, moorland, dramatic when the weather plays along. The gritstone edges are some of the most important rock climbing in Britain – Stanage alone has over a thousand named routes.

The White Peak – the limestone plateau to the south and west, around Matlock, Bakewell, and the Manifold Valley – is softer, greener, more obviously beautiful in the chocolate-box sense. Chatsworth sits in this territory. Bakewell, with its puddings and its Monday market, is a White Peak town. Dovedale and the gorges of the limestone south are the Peak District that ends up on tourist brochures. Sheffield people use it, but the Dark Peak is theirs in a more particular way.

The effect on Sheffield’s personality is measurable. The outdoor culture here is not performative – not the Instagrammable weekend hiking that’s become a London lifestyle category. It’s genuinely practical. People walk in the Peak District because it’s there, because it’s free, because fifteen minutes in a car produces a landscape that most of the country requires a two-hour journey to access. The running clubs, climbing clubs, cycling clubs in Sheffield are serious and large because the terrain to use is immediately available.

The Monsal Trail – the former railway line through the limestone dales converted to a cycling and walking route – is one of the most beautiful cycling experiences in England. The Hope Valley railway, which runs from Sheffield through Hathersage and Hope to Edale and Manchester, is one of the most scenic train journeys in the country and uses standard Northern Rail rolling stock, which is the correct amount of understatement for a Sheffield experience.

Estate agents in Sheffield use “15 minutes from the Peak District” as a selling point with the same regularity that London estate agents use “close to transport links.” In Sheffield the claim is true and the transport links are also fine, but the Peak District is the thing. It always has been.