National Trails eNewsletter

Newsletter August 2010 enews August 2010

River Mole at Box Hill, North Downs Way. Anne-Katrin Purkiss © Natural England

Hello all,

I hope you have enjoyed the warm summer so far. Here in the Cotswolds it has been almost too hot to walk some days. I helped organise the first Winchcombe Walking Festival in May. Having started the planning at Christmas, we were well prepared for wet weather, but had to stock up on sun screen and bottles of water at the last minute. I even delivered ice lollies to one group who were on a full day walk on the Cotswold Way in 30oC heat.

There isn’t too much to report on National Trails at the moment, it is business as usual maintaining the routes. At this time of year the rangers and armies of volunteers are kept busy cutting back vegetation, which can grow at an alarming rate. On busier sections of Trail they can be constantly interrupted by walkers who stop for a chat or ask for advice, but sharing their local knowledge is all part of the job and they love showing off!

This year we are saying Happy Birthday to the Pembrokeshire Coast Path, which is 40 years old. I have to admit that this National Trail is one of my favourites. I love the rugged remoteness of the northern section, with its unspoilt beaches, jagged cliffs, sheltered harbours and offshore islands. Then there are gentler beaches on the southern section, backed by dunes and surrounded by limestone headlands where you can almost believe you are in the Mediterranean. But most of all I love the wildlife. The wild flowers in May are spectacular and there is always the chance of spotting seals, dolphins and porpoises. The bird life never ceases to amaze me, the contrast between the spectacular displays of the peregrines, ravens, choughs and gannets and the smaller birds such as wrens and stonechats marking their territory on the gorse and blackthorn bushes.

It is also 40 years since the Cotswold Way began its life as a long distance route, although it wasn’t adopted and upgraded to a National Trail until 2007. This was featured on BBC Countryfile a few weeks ago.

I have been doing a lot of walking in mid-Wales recently, in the Wye Valley, and I’m falling in love with the area as a place to get away from it all. Other walkers are few and far between, the farmhouse B&Bs have been friendly and comfortable and the pubs serve the cheapest drinks and best ‘Welsh Black’ steaks I have ever tasted. I must put Glyndŵr’s Way down on my list of things to do next year and I hope to meet some of you along the way! 

Back in June, National Trails were asked to send a representative to Toronto to take part in the International section of a Trails Conference. Because we are committed to keeping costs and carbon emissions to a minimum, we asked if we could take part by video conference. It was agreed and on 21 June, Paul Johnson, one of Natural England’s experts on access to the countryside joined representatives from Canada, the USA, Ireland, Norway and Scotland in a video discussion. Paul explained the background to National Trails and Rights of Way in Britain, which is very different to other countries. He talked about how we organise the creation and maintenance of our Trails, then went on to explain about open access and our plans for coastal access.

Organising the conference was challenging and we got a bit confused with time zones, but luckily we tested everything the day before and on the day the technology worked well and the session was very successful. Different countries have developed very different ways of creating, maintaining and publicising their Trails and it was really exciting to be able to share our good practice with others around the world and to learn from them.

I have been checking the website statistics recently and so I thought I would share some of them with you. The number of people showing an interest in National Trails continues to grow year on year, with individual visitors to the website nearing 1,300,000 in the last year, but it is interesting to see that your usage of the Trails seems to be changing. From studying the number of documents downloaded, it is clear that circular walks are gaining in popularity, for instance 2,400 people have downloaded circular walks on the Cleveland Way in the last year and a staggering 5,500 people have downloaded the Hadrian’s Wall short walks booklet.

Other popular downloads are distance calculators and information sheets about public transport, accommodation, volunteering and maps (where we have them). We know that better maps is something that most of you would like, so we are working on that one.

The National Trails Website Development Survey will be closing very soon so if you would like to give us your views then please follow the link.  We have had a great response so far and have received useful suggestions for how we could improve the site in the future.

That’s all from me, so I will hand you over to David McGlade, the Trail Manager for Hadrian’s Wall Path, which is our featured Trail in this Newsletter. Hadrian’s Wall Path hit the headlines all over the world in March with the ‘Lighting the Trail’ event. It captured the imagination of the public and some flew from the other side of the world to take part.

Enjoy the rest of the summer, 
Sheila Talbot

News from Hadrian's Wall Path

We are already into our eighth walking season since the Trail opened in 2003 and the Trail Passport is now more popular than ever.  Almost everyone that you see carries the Passport, which operates between 1st May and 31st October each year, and during the peak season queues are not uncommon at the stamping stations along the way.  This year we have introduced a new, seventh, stamping station at Housesteads Roman Fort where the exterior box is located beside the entrance to the English Heritage museum. 

The idea behind the Housesteads stamping point is to help conserve the Trail/monument and reduce wear and tear to a steep slope to the north of the fort.  At the beginning of August, some three months into the season, it is working well and the Trail’s two lengthsmen, Alan and Richard, have repaired the slope with compost, re-seeded it, with a new line mown in the grass to guide day visitors and Trail walkers not carrying the Passport away from the area under repair.

The Passport costs £2.00 each and can be obtained in advance of your walk by mail order from www.hadrians-wall.org/shop  or by sending a cheque, payable to Hadrian’s Wall Heritage Limited, to: Hadrian’s Wall Heritage Limited, East Peterel Field, Dipton Mill Road, Hexham, NE47 2JT.

 

Nothing stands still on Hadrian’s Wall Path and it is in a continual state of improvement.  At the time of writing two small-scale changes are planned for the route in 2010 with two more proposed.  This August and September sees a major improvement to the Trail on the Northumberland/Cumbria border between Greenhead and Gilsland where several stiles are being replaced by easier going wicket and kissing gates.  Every structure situated in the Scheduled Monument Area requires an archaeological evaluation where so far several shards of Roman pottery have been found in the trenches. (image – trench for kissing gate can follow Tuesday). 

Each year our knowledge of how the Trail and the monument, on a field-by-field basis, reacts to visitor pressures and to different climatic conditions.  2008 and 2009 were both very wet summers but 2010, after a wet start, has experienced several long dry spells.  Alan and Richard modify their management techniques according to the conditions and you are bound to come across their handiwork.  Do stop and say hello to them – they will be pleased to explain what they are doing and why their work is important.

The conservation of the Roman Wall and its associated earthworks is always at the forefront of our minds.  Almost everything that we do is geared towards the protection of the grass surface because it is still considered to be the best way of protecting any buried archaeology.  (Visitors frequently remark that grass is their favourite walking surface).  We have sponsored several archaeological evaluations over the years and in almost every case the archaeologists from Oxford Archaeology North have found buried structures and artefacts only a few centimetres below the surface of the ground. 

The preparations for the new road bridge across the river Eden, to the west of Carlisle, revealed the foundations of Hadrian’s Wall (image – Wall foundations).  Please note that the bridge construction site will continue throughout 2011 and, while it does affect the Trail, it will remain open with only very minor clearly marked diversions through the building site. 

Trail walkers can play a big part in helping us to manage the Trail and monument in a sustainable way.  We have published a couple of very simple tips that we ask everyone, whether you are an end-to-end walker or a day visitor to the Wall, to follow.  First of all please resist the temptation to walk on top of the surviving masonry Wall, also where it survives as a buried Wall-mound.  (There is one exception to this rule, at Housesteads Roman Fort where, because it is structurally strong enough, you are allowed to walk on top of two hundred metres of Hadrian’s Wall - courtesy of the National Trust). 

The Trail team, managed by Hadrian’s Wall Heritage Limited, took the lead and coordinated the production of a new notice for the World Heritage Site that asks visitors to not walk on the Wall.

The other critically important thing that all visitors to the Wall can do is to walk side-by-side instead of in single file.  (pdf image walk side-by-side) Simply by doing that the carrying capacity of the grass path and monument is effectively doubled.  Alan and Richard say that enough walkers are following the tip for it to make a difference and, together with their stitch-in-time maintenance; it is helping the general condition of the Trail to improve.

This summer the Trail launched its visitor donation fund.  Walkers are invited to make donations to pay for value-added conservation projects along the line of the Trail.  The back panel of the Passport has a mail order form for purchasing the purple enamel achievers’ badge (for walkers who collect all seven stamps in their Passport) where donations can also be made.  Alternatively, you can make a donation via the Pay Pal page at www.hadrians-wall.org/shop. 

This has been an exciting year for Hadrian’s Wall Path.  New path furniture and replacement signs, repairs to hitherto muddy farm tracks and the daily proactive grassland management are all contributing to the Trail’s overall feel-good factor as well as the monument’s state of preservation.  While on the Trail we hope that you will actively engage with our conservation work and in so doing feel that you have contributed to its well-being.

David McGlade
National Trail Manager

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