The Ridgeway

Of course, I could be out of touch here, but I thought it was the responsibility of the highway authority to repair unsurfaced rights of way?

Bad as that picture looks, if it was originally a drovers road (as it seems) it would have been every bit as bad by the time cattle had been driven to market - so what exactly are people trying to preserve - its abandoned unused recent state or as it probably was with a few hundred head of cattle and the odd ox cart !

Andrew Mawson

But it's also the social responsibility of the users (ie, us, horse riders, ramblers, farmers, trail bikes, etc) not to completely trash them. And the ramblers are bound to get the most irate, because they're causing less damage than anybody else, followed by the horse riders.

If you drove down the M25 in a 60 tonne tank and wrecked the surface with your tracks, you'd not be very popular.

D

But whole sections of the Penine Way have been closed off in the past because of damage caused by walkers, but no one in a bobble hat will acknowledge it as a valid counter arguement, especially as vehicles are not able to use the Penine Way........

-- Simon Isaacs

Peterborough 4x4 Club Vice Chairman and Webmaster

3.5V8 100" Hybrid Part owner of 1976 S3 LWT, currently under restoration Suzuki SJ410 (Girlfriend, at the moment......) just taken delivery of new bodyshell and 3" lift kit....Oh dear......... Series 3 88" Rolling chassis...what to do next Pug 106 (offroaded once!!)

On or around Fri, 5 Mar 2004 16:51:33 -0000, "YC" enlightened us thusly:

yer not out of touch, but you may be naive, not wishing to be rude.

Most of the councils can't afford to maintain the main roads to an acceptable standard.

and looking at that picture, which doubtless is taken for maximum effect, how much would it cost even to lay a solid path for the walkers/horsey types/cyclists, if the whole thing is like that?

The only way I see for us to retain vehicle rights on these old routes is for the "off-roaders" to contribute time or money to the maintenance, and also to practice sufficient self-control as to not trash the bloody things in the first place.

i live just a couple of miles from the ridgeway , it depends which part you want to drive along . yes the ruts are getting bigger , but also the ridgeway trust are working on various parts and adding scalpings .

the main problem of damage to the ridgeway is done by farm tractors and eqpt churning the ruts up in the autumn months when they are ploughing and seeding etc , although i am not complaining about this because farmers have more right to use the ridgeway than anyone else because its part theyre network of lanes needed in order to reach fields .

damage is also done by people who drive along it when its muddy , and this deepens the ruts .

i used to drive from avebury to uffington castle but im afraid some parts are very tricky now , especially behind liddington hill where there is one rut almost 18 inches deep and no room to pass by the side .

the ramblers seem to think they own all trails within the uk , but fail to realise that we the british people ALL own them between us and we all have a right to use the trails for our own enjoyment as much as anyone else . seems to me that most ramblers are townies who dont even live in the countryside , so quite how they manage to understand how things work out in the wilderness i will never know .

there are thousands of miles of paths in this country that vehicles arent allowed to go on , so why dont the ramblers go and walk on those instead of try and stop us off road vehicle users from using one of the very few tracks still left available to us .

some people take dogs for walks along the ridgeway , let them crap all over the place, worry animals and other walkers at the same time , but do we complain publically about it ? no we dont ..

if the ridgeway were not kept open by vehicles passing along it then it would almost certainly return back to nature and be unpassable as a path or road .

the guys i feel like shacking hands with are the big noisey trail bike riders , now these guys know how to make the ramblers scatter in all directions .

perhaps the softly softly approach isnt working very well for 4x4 drivers !!.

.

Less damage, not No damage. D

But as usual, even if 99.9% of us are responsible, you only have to have a couple of tw%ts to spoil it for everybody. There's a couple of lanes down in Surrey where a few irresponsible cretins have gone off the track and ploughed up the banking and into the woods. It's certainly nobody I know from the Land Rover or GLASS fraternity.

It's impractical, but what I'd quite like to see is a system where only licensed Green Laners, who were bound to a code of responsibility, care and safety under an organisation such as GLASS, could use the lanes. Then everybody wins. But it would be virtually impossible to implement.

David

I don't know about you, but I would love to drive around the M25 in a tank!....or the M6 Stafford t' t'other side of Birmingham... or the A1 to Hatfield...the A5 Shrewsbury to Wrexham...M40 etc. etc.

you just want a tank don't you?

Andy

|| Bad as that picture looks, if it was originally a drovers road (as || it seems) it would have been every bit as bad by the time cattle had || been driven to market - so what exactly are people trying to || preserve - its abandoned unused recent state or as it probably was || with a few hundred head of cattle and the odd ox cart ! ||

Precisely. You have just pointed out the "con" in conservation. Conservation sounds cuddly, earth-friendly and totally brilliant, but in practice it means preserving a naturally changing environment in one particular state - a state that the green lobby deem to be the "correct" one.

We've got a stretch of river here, running through sheep/cow fields, which has almost developed an ox-bow lake, a completely natural process taking hundreds or even thousands of years. Last year, the conservation boys got onto the case, and now the banks are shored up with massive (imported) stone blocks, they have created a 2m wide protection area on both banks, fenced off with 4ft high wire fencing, and the cattle drink only at a couple of specially-constructed sites which look about as natural as a skyscraper in the desert. The spot where the river was about to break through is now as safe as houses. I used to walk the dog there every day, and with careful use of two or three sticks, I could get him to swim about a mile each way. Now I can't - they've left too much barbed wire at river level and you can't get to the banks anyway. And it all looks ugly.

But hey, we've "conserved" the river in its natural state in 2003, so that's a victory for the environment, isn't it?

Sorry, rant over, thanks for listening.

That's a shame, because one of the nice things about oxbow lakes is that they then develop into very nice fertile meadows (again, it's not an overnight process) due to the nature of the sedimentation. Did anybody question the people who did this? What was the rationale?

I'm sure you are historically correct. That picture is the Ridgeway at Gore Hill on the Berkshire Downs BTW. But the problem is not conservationists but the Ramblers Assc who use such pictures to justify their demands to have Greenlaners banned totally. My point is that if they and the horse riders got a hard path and we kept to our muddy bit (it is wide enough) then there could be no conflict between us that would hold water.

"David French" wrote

Not that difficult David. A couple of years ago, as a computer expert since the days of the first PCs in the late 1970s; I found that I was past my 'sell by date', to get another IT job.

So I got a job as a driver. With a licence that was 40 years old, I could drive D1 & C1 motors, but nothing bigger. So I was tought in 3 days to drive a 2.55 m wide coach and passed my Cat D test on the thursday. The Cat C and ADR came a few months later.

For unsurfaced driving I was tought by David Bowyer over 10 years ago. That could now give us a new Cat driving licence that required to be displayed on the windscreen. GLASS, ACU or LARA could provide this a very low cost.

Damage the surface and loose your licence, plus a fine. Easy.

Reg.

nice comment but im afraid that the RAMBLERS want ALL paths/rupps/boat and tracks and the ridgeway to themselves regardless of what anyone else in the country wants .

ramblers are very selfish individuals with freinds in parliament whom they can persuade to change the law to suit theyre own wants and needs .

have you ever met a rambler who is willing to share something with others ?. .

Well it does appear that way.

Well we are walkers too, mainly the Surrey Hills, and I must admit that if we are unfortunate enough to meet a pack of Ramblers ( why do they amble in large groups?) they seem to have trouble letting us past. We've had to scramble through the undergrowth on more than one occasion when they ignored our requests for room to pass. Luckily we tend not to meet many people, which is part of the pleasure for us.

God knows what those Ramblers would do if they knew we were Landrover drivers too. :-)

Bit of a generalisation there. It's like saying all Land Rover drivers charge around muddy tracks at high speed carving up the countryside. In reality, the minority that cause trouble are the ones who get noticed.

The Ramblers' Association does have a bit of a reputation for being the militant arm of the hobby, but there's a difference between "ramblers" and "The Ramblers' Association". And again, it's the extremists that get noticed, not the thousands who just go out to enjoy the countryside, like we do.

Yes, I've met both ramblers and members of The Ramblers' Association who were happy to share the countryside with Land Rover users.

David

I had this thought. An ox-bow lake silts up and becomes a nice little wetland habitat, I would have thought. I questioned the people doing this (River Authority, Environment Agency and a few others, headed by a professor, no less) and made my opposition clear, but it aint my land so my opinion counted for diddly-squat in the end.

The rationale behind the fencing was that the cows were knocking down the banks. I never got to hear why they should interrupt a thousand-year process to prevent a perfectly natural ox-bow developing. I suspect it wasn't part of the plan for the area, so it couldn't be allowed to happen.

One nice thing - they put in huge amounts of rubble to make rubble beds for the fish to breed. So the river sounds much nicer, tinkly rushing water etc. Only you can't get near it any more, so "sounds" is as near as it gets. And the fish stocks will improve, only no-one can fly-fish there any more because of the 4ft fencing 2 metres from the bank. The landowner (a widow of 90) made a few quid each summer from selling the fishing rights - one pound per rod per day. The fishermen haven't been back, though, so she's lost that too. The professor and his team kept coming back time after time, persuading her that it was a good thing, until she finally gave in. I was furious but powerless.

The anglers have gone, the man walking his dog has gone, the cows are behind a nice new fence, and the river is filling with fish that no-one will ever see. A result for the conservationists, then.

Whilst I'm sympathetic to your licensing idea I don't see how it (alone) would stop the morons from doing just what they're doing already.

What is really needed is more vigilance by the responsible majority and a determination to report the cretins to the police when we have real evidence of their activities. Then, of course, we have to rely on the constabulary to pursue the matter ... but that's a different issue.

Regards Steve G