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Lax laws lead to footpath wars
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Lax laws lead to footpath wars
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| MOST OF US have very few complaints about living in
Lincolnshire. We do not have the bitterness caused by second homes that is
experienced in parts of the West Country. We are spared the language
divisions of North Wales. Our post-industrial dereliction is more
manageable than in some parts of Northern England. Even our low pay
problem is sometimes wished away as all down to a false image we have in
the eyes of outside investors. What we do have is footpath wars. We are quite simply the worst county in England for the upkeep of our Rights of Way, according to official tables. Yellowbellies and incomers alike sometimes blame this on the demands of intensive crop agriculture. Some of the paths strike out diagonally across arable fields only to peter out on the parish boundary. Or they go through paddocks or gardens emerging at the roadside next to a house built long after the right of way was consolidated in the 1950s. Perhaps the owners thought that the rights of way would atrophy and eventually disappear. You can see how many paths we have lost by comparing an Ordnance Survey map from Victorian times with one published today. There are still villages where farmers dominate the parish council and some look pained at the very mention of a public right of way. I know. I live in such a village. Older villagers can remember the landscape of depressed agriculture between the wars. Pasture and meadow with hedges, good for walking and good for wildlife. Then came the U-boat threat and a national drive to plough everything up and grow more food for Britain which continued after the Second World War ended and through the years of austerity and rationing which followed. Paying farmers production subsidies became a habit long after it served any vital purpose that the Common Agricultural Policy has kept going to the present time. Pasture became arable monoculture. Hedges were grubbed up. Wildlife extinguished in a chemical blitz. Don't blame the farmers. This is what we asked them to do. Now it's change again. Pressure for housing development is all pervasive. Housing development, where permitted on farming land, is a guarantee of riches. The 99% of us who don't farm want to see those production subsidies go to landscape regeneration and wildlife and to see arable scaled back to its historic position as one part of a wider patchwork of needs. Everybody knows this, but few are prepared to say so publicly. Lincolnshire County Council could be leading a balanced debate about how to manage these changes but instead, stands like King Canute before the waves of public opinion, an analogy that is probably very unfair to King Canute. To see what the future holds for Lincolnshire's footpaths it is only necessary to examine what has already happened in the southern counties. There, armies of well-heeled and/or articulate people make it their business to see that footpaths and field paths are taken seriously. Where paths cross fields they are clearly marked out. Where paths run parallel to gardens or paddocks they are properly laid out, fenced and signposted. The richer the residents, the better kept the public footpaths. Walking in the stockbroker belt has never been easier. Woe betides the likes of Surrey County Council if a footpath obstruction is not removed according to law. Expect a landowner to be prosecuted if notice is served and deadlines are ignored. In many Kesteven villages that same tide is coming in, courtesy of new housing estates built on farmland. The planning may be contentious; the pace may be too quick, too greedy; the talk of affordable housing just that, all talk, but the rewards are so great you cannot blame landowners for wanting a part of the gold rush. We are not going to become another Surrey, thank goodness, but there is only one plausible scenario for us: all this new housing will generate a demand for recreation and to enjoy the rights of way already freely available to citizens in the rest of our crowded island. Would it not be more sensible for Lincolnshire County Council’s Highways Department, our footpath authority, to wise up? They have the legal powers and they don't use them. At present, the county council does not prosecute recalcitrant landowners who knowingly break the law. Consequently, human nature being what it is, a large minority of our farmers and landowners pitch their behaviour accordingly and get away with abuses that would not be tolerated anywhere else. The outcome is bad footpaths and a bad reputation for our county. A family walk in the countryside on Boxing Day produced one signpost uprooted and facing the wrong way, while in another village the signpost had disappeared. One Lincolnshire born and bred walker of 35 years’ campaigning experience recently wrote: “I asked the county council to take firmer enforcement action against the hard core offenders who quite knowingly illegally obstructed rights of way. I was told there were other ways of dealing with such problems.” The county highways department cynically calculates that the rising tide of demand for footpaths can be dealt with in "other ways", for which read sweet talk and business as usual. When pressed they argue that "there are other groups who would have completely different views on priorities". This revealing statement from Brian Thompson of that department is true enough but his authority is responsible for delivering a statutory public service, not just mediating between different client groups. I began by mentioning our county's image problem, no laughing matter if it deters inward investment and keeps wages low. I conducted a very unscientific survey of the next generation, based on friends of my partner's children. How did they see Lincolnshire? "Get off my land", they chorused. We pay for the delinquency of our County Council on rights of way. WRITTEN DECEMBER 2003
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