Maps detail 2,748 miles of coastal paths as Natural England prepares to open up shoreline to walkers
The obstacle course of barbed wire, live ammunition and beetling cliffs facing England’s planned coastal path is revealed in detail for the first time today.
Maps drawn up for the marine and coastal access bill, which is expected to become law in November, trace a vivid red and green snake round the 2,748 miles of mainland coast. Each of the red sections is either private, inaccessible or dangerous.
The audit by Natural England and shoreline councils is part of an effort to make all of England’s coastline accessible to walkers. “There will be 10 years’ work to be done before we can walk the whole way,” said Paul Johnson, coastal access manager for Natural England, “but we reckon that the first rights of way between major seaside towns could be in place by 2013.”
The notion of a complete coastal ring goes back to at least the 18th century, although its supporters then were often landowners rather than ramblers seeking a right to roam. They came up with the nearest thing to the access bill’s proposals: the “coastguard’s path” which allowed customs officers to pounce on smugglers.
The prospect of extra visitors to coastal areas has won over all of the 53 councils involved in the mapping exercise, as well as most fishing and other coastal businesses. Natural England said that the South West Coast path, which takes an average of 56 days to complete, generates an estimated £300m annually.
The Natural England study found that 66% of the coast, excluding Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland which are working on their own access, can be walked safely. Much the best figure is 76% in the south-west where a 630-mile national trail, the longest in Britain, follows the coast between Minehead and Poole harbour.
But even this still faces diversions 31 years after the last section was opened, including four military training areas. Johnson said that the bill’s provisions would speed up and improve ways round such obstacles, which can take up to four years via current public inquiries. The new process will also keep unavoidable diversions as close as possible to the sea.
Access in other areas is much worse. Nowhere from Berwick-upon-Tweed to the Solway Firth currently offers more than two miles of walking without a barrier or diversion inland. And the Cleveland Way in Yorkshire, is 40 years old but still diverts walkers because of legal problems with landowners, on to a busy A-road along one stretch.
“The challenge is to move ahead from the stop-start effect which shows in the maps we publish today,” said Poul Christensen, acting chair of Natural England. The group’s chief executive Dr Helen Phillips said: “The fact that the public lacks full access to nearly 1,000 miles of coastline is a sobering reminder of how much is at stake in the bill.”
The lop-sided ratio in the north-west, where 56% of the coast is closed, reflects industrial use on Merseyside and the Cumbrian coast from Barrow-in-Furness’s shipyards to nuclear and chemical works as far as Workington. The figures are better on the North Sea coast but Natural England estimates that 13% of existing routes there will be lost to erosion in the next two decades.
“The value of the new law will be allowing the coastal path to retreat naturally, in line with erosion,” said Malcolm Hodgson, national trail officer for the Cleveland Way. The law will end controversial “make-do” arrangements such as a stretch between Robin Hood’s Bay and Boggle Hole in North Yorkshire, where walkers trudge a straight line between two barbed-wire fences across a field used for grazing stock.
The arrangement followed failure to negotiate a path nearer the sea-cliffs, because erosion of up to three feet a year meant regular moving of the farmer’s fence. Natural England has offered limited help in such cases, but the access bill is based on the argument that fences would have to retreat anyway, walkers or not.
The Country Land and Business Association (CLA), which represents 36,000 members, criticised the report for including permissive access, which can be withdrawn by landowners, in the red zones. The group’s president Henry Aubrey-Fletcher said: “It would have been better if the government did more to improve the quality of existing access, such as with the provision of car parks and toilets, rather than try to secure access to the entire English coastline.”
He added that the CLA was pleased that the bill gave landowners a legal right to appeal against new or altered coastal routes.”
The new path will not be hemmed in by health and safety precautions along wild clifftops, dunes and seashore. Johnson said: “Landowners with the path crossing their land will actually face less liability when the bill becomes law. It will be almost impossible to sue after accidents, which unfortunately are bound to happen from time to time.”
Regional figures:
North West 421 miles 44% access
North East 183 miles 67%
Yorkshire and Humber 174 miles 70%
East Midlands 98 miles 61%
East of England 534 miles 68%
South East 569 miles 63%
South West 768 miles 76%
A long and literary history of the struggle for coastal access
It was the finest moment in England’s long struggle for coastal access: when Elfrida Swancourt knotted her underclothes into a rope and hoisted her lover back on to what Natural England calls the “satisfactory, legally secure path”.
Thomas Hardy caught it all: the sense of wild, wide open space, exultant freedom above the crashing sea, the buzz of freedom and, of course, the pouring rain. Add the glitch which sends Henry Knight sliding to near-doom in A Pair of Blue Eyes and you have the complete experience; for obstacles have always been a given in coastal walking.
These days private notices, red flags on gunnery ranges, even the scary yellow-and-black propellor thing warning of a Nuclear Zone are what impedes many a coastal ramble. No one in England lives more than 70 miles from the sea, but when we go there, we are lucky to walk much more than a mile along the coast before we are blocked.
For many, this is a stimulus to exploration and ingenuity and if you have checked the tide tables, the beach is best; the foreshore with its pebbles and shells and coils of grainy sand-eel spoil is ours to tramp for keeps.
That still leaves naval bases, ports, chemical works and plunging cliffs like Elfrida’s with no beach below them, but orienteering can be even more stimulating there. Paul Theroux’s circuit of the coast described in Kingdom by the Sea showed how an alley in Cardiff or a street of bungalows in Peacehaven are part of the coast-walking experience, and a fascinating one.
Grumbly landowners are the only inexcusable blockage, and the one which the new bill will hopefully remove.
• Martin Wainwright is author of Coast to Coast Walk.
Is the Big Green Gathering another victim of the crackdown on dissent?
August 4, 2009Organisers of the long-running festival have reason to believe that an excuse was contrived to bankrupt them
Is it paranoia, or are they really out to get us? Most of the time it’s paranoia. Every week I’m approached by people whispering about vapour trails from planes being used to control our minds, free energy devices suppressed by oil companies or missile attacks on the twin towers. Sometimes, as we saw at the G20 protests on 1 April or at climate camp last year, they are out to get us. The policing of these events shows that some of the UK’s public authorities really do regard political activism as a threat that must be contained or eliminated.
So what do you make of this story? Right now the last stragglers should have been packing up their tents at the end of the Big Green Gathering. It’s a festival in Somerset that attracts about 20,000 people to listen to music, plan protests and raise money for green causes. It has been running since 1994 and there has never been any significant trouble.
But this year the gathering didn’t happen. On Friday 24 July, five days before the festival was due to open, the district council applied to the high court for an injunction against it. If they failed to abide by the injunction, the directors of the Big Green Gathering could have their assets seized and be fined or sent to prison.
The council’s witness statement contained an impossible bind. It maintained that “the requisite consents cannot at this late stage be granted”, then went on to explain that the order “contains a proviso which will permit this event to run” – as long as the gathering obtains the requisite consents. No one could blame the organisers for accepting defeat, handing back their licence and cancelling the festival. The Big Green Gathering will now go bankrupt. It’s unlikely ever to happen again. Cock-up or conspiracy?
As any old hippy will tell you, festivals aren’t what they used to be. Gone are the days when you could announce a happening, call up a few mates with drums and guitars, and put the word out that something groovy and free was about to kick off. In these buttoned-down times, it would be treated like an al-Qaida training camp. Today, you must apply for a licence and spend months of your life filling in forms and liaising with the various responsible authorities. There are good reasons for this: it ensures that no one is crushed to death and that local people aren’t harried by intolerable noise and disruption. There are also bad reasons: the controlling, snooping, curtain-twitching state tendencies which insist that all spontaneity be planned six months in advance, that no one can ever take her top off or smoke homegrown weed or get a little bit outrageous – even within a festival site – for fear of offending some tight-arsed busybody in desperate need of a life.
The organisers applied for their licence in February, and spent the intervening months trying to meet the conditions. These included 450 security guards, a steel perimeter fence and watchtowers, and free wristbands for 12 undercover police officers, who could move through the crowds ensuring that no one was enjoying themselves too much. The site would have more of the ambience of a prison camp than a hippy festival, but at least it would conform to regulations.
The gathering submitted a 100-page management plan. On 30 June the various authorities (police, fire, environmental heath, county council and the rest) said they were satisfied with the arrangements. The district council gave the festival a licence. But in July the security company suddenly demanded that the gathering pay the whole fee up front. The festival refused and hired another company, which would take some of the money after the event.
So there was a cock-up. But it doesn’t wholly explain what happened next. On 23 July, the organisers were suddenly confronted with a list of demands that they believed they had already met. The Devon and Somerset fire brigade demanded to know that the company hired by the festival, Midland Fire Services, had “an acceptable level of competency”. As Midland Fire Services has been employed by the gathering for several years without complaint, and as it does the same job for the Royal Tattoo, Womad, the Reading and Leeds festivals and other public events, the organisers couldn’t understand why, at the 11th hour, its competence was suddenly being challenged. The fire brigade hasn’t been able to answer my questions.
But the real sticking point was the road closure order. To keep its licence, the festival would need an order from Somerset county council to shut the local roads to any traffic except the gathering’s. The organisers thought it was a formality: there had never been a problem before. Out of the blue on Friday 24 July, the county council told the gathering that its maps were incomplete, and that its signs did not conform to regulations and some of them “are located within North Somerset and therefore we cannot approve their use”.
The organisers responded that the maps and signs are the same ones they had used in previous years, since when the regulations haven’t changed, and that the county council claims jurisdiction over the whole of Somerset, including the north. It approved the same signs in the same places in 2006 and 2007. But – or so it seemed – the county council would not budge. The application the district council sent to the courts insisted no road closure order had been granted. Strangely, however, the only authority that did not submit a witness statement was Somerset county council.
So the organisers surrendered the licence, cancelled the festival, and set about the sorry task of clearing the site. But as they were doing so, an odd thing happened. They found two notices, one on a fence post, another in a hedge. I have photos of them. They are issued by Somerset county council and dated 20 July 2009. They announce the closure of the roads leading to the festival.
So was a road closure order issued or not? Somerset county council sent me a response but didn’t answer my question about whether or not an order had been granted. The county council, the district council, and Avon and Somerset police insist they have done everything to facilitate the gathering, but that the organisers hadn’t got their act together.
The organisers allege a deliberate attempt to bankrupt the Big Green Gathering: they say that the authorities left their new objections until the last minute. This meant that they carried on spending right up to the eve of the festival, and that by then it was too late to get legal advice and mount a challenge. They point out that if the road closure order had, in reality, been issued, the main sticking point was a fake one: the authorities had manufactured an excuse to close them down.
Are they being paranoid? I don’t know. But it looks pretty odd to me.