Alston Moor is technically a civil parish - the parish, until 1974, was called Alston with Garrigill - but it functions as a small country of its own, drained by three of England's great rivers. The South Tyne rises in the fells above Garrigill. The Rivers Nent and Black Burn feed it. The Tees and the Wear both have their sources on the borders of the parish. From this single block of upland, water runs east to the North Sea via the Tyne, the Tees, and the Wear, and south-west into the Eden. The parish includes the town of Alston, the villages of Garrigill and Nenthead, and a scatter of hamlets - Nenthall, Nentsberry, Galligill, Blagill, Ashgill, Leadgate, Bayles, Raise - whose names map the old mining geography. The whole moor lies within the North Pennines Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty, the second-largest of England and Wales's forty AONBs.

Alston Moor had some of the largest deposits of lead and zinc ores in Britain. Lead was probably mined here in Roman times - the Romans built a fort called Epiacum at Whitley Castle, and pieces of lead ore and slag have been found there. By the medieval period the Crown was interested because lead ore here contains a small fraction of silver, on which rents could be charged. When Sir Edward Radcliffe, Earl of Derwentwater, bought the estate in 1629 for £2,500, the mines were believed to be virtually exhausted. They were not. After the Radcliffes' lands were confiscated for their part in the failed 1715 Jacobite rising, the government assigned the estate to the Admiralty to support the Royal Hospital for Seamen at Greenwich. From the 18th century, Greenwich Hospital leased mining rights to a series of companies. The most significant was the London Lead Company, run by Quakers. By the mid-19th century Alston Moor was one of England's main lead-producing areas, especially around Nenthead, and the population peaked at about 6,858 in 1831.

The British lead industry collapsed in the 1860s, undercut by cheaper imports. By 1896 the leases had passed to the Belgian company Vieille Montagne, which worked the mines for zinc instead - a metal that had been left in the spoil heaps for centuries because no one had cared about it. The 20th century saw a gradual fade. Little remained of the industry after the Second World War, though the smelt mill at Nenthead can still be seen and a few of the old mines are accessible to those who know what they are doing. The population of the parish, which had once been 5,000, was 2,088 at the 2011 census. Greenwich Hospital remained the dominant landowner until the 1960s, when it transferred to the Trustees for Catholic Purposes; in the 1990s the remaining estate was sold. Hundreds of small mines, shafts, and spoil heaps are merging into the moorland - an industrial archaeology slowly being overwritten by heather and bog.

Alston Moor is home to England's highest golf course. The Alston Moor Golf Club was founded in 1905 and has occupied several sites over the years; the current course is at Hermitage Farm. The official opening was on Easter Monday 1906, though there is evidence a club existed for some time before that. The course makes the point that the moor is not always grim - on a clear summer evening, with the light slanting low across the heather and the larks going up from the rough, it is one of the most ridiculously beautiful places in England to lose a golf ball. Close to the South Tyne, two miles north of Alston, stands Randalholme Hall, a 17th-century house built around a 14th-century pele tower - the kind of fortified strongpoint that border country needed when raids from Scotland were a routine fact of life.