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Towards an accessible countryside

By David Shaftoe, Open Country

Open Country, the Yorkshire-based charity for whom I work, gives people with a disability the chance to access and enjoy the countryside by providing a wide variety of outdoor activities, including walking, cycling, nature conservation projects, wildlife study and outings. We also offer a wealth of access publications, advice and training.

We were established exactly 30 years ago to examine why so few apparently disabled people visited the countryside. Three decades on, the national picture is much brighter but there remains a substantial amount of work to be done to deliver a truly inclusive countryside.

Open Country has always had a ‘can-do’ approach to improving ‘access for all’. Some staff members have been countryside managers themselves and we would rather work with oft-beleaguered land managers than against them. There is much to be gained from encouraging inclusive access, as disabled people are a powerful force for good in the countryside. Each year for example, our conservation work parties complete around 2,000 work days in the countryside – an in-kind contribution of volunteer time of over £100,000. At a difficult time economically, when many budgets are being re-evaluated, the countryside industry surely needs all the friends that it can get and encouraging more people to discover the great outdoors can only be beneficial for our Industry.

There can be a dearth of information on the subject of ‘access for all’. One good source is ‘By All Reasonable Means’ (2017) an inclusive access guide re-written by Natural Resources Wales as part of its Equality Act 2010 commitment to ensuring access to the countryside and open spaces is equally available to people of all ages, circumstances and backgrounds. It is designed to help countryside and natural resource managers improve accessibility of their sites, routes and facilities, particularly for people who have limited opportunities to enjoy these places. The aim is to provide a realistic, practical and effective approach to access improvements, creating more access, in more places, for more people. Most importantly for countryside managers, the publication has really useful access standards, which are easy to follow.

Open Country agrees with the principle that access improvements will benefit all visitors. ‘Accessibility’ should be addressed in its widest sense, embracing all the protected characteristics identified by the Equality Act (2010).

With just a small fraction of the countryside fully accessible, doing nothing is not an option. We espouse the principle of ‘Least Restrictive Access’ - an approach that aims for the highest standards reasonably possible for a particular piece of work. To illustrate the principle, a visitor attraction we use holds snowdrop walks for a few weeks each year. Clearly, undertaking major access improvement works is not an economic or realistic option. However they painted prominent tree roots and overhanging branches in brilliant white so that, at the very least, some visually-impaired people could navigate their way round the walk more safely. Disabled people do not expect heaven and earth to be moved for them; neither should they expect to be ignored.

Physical access is just one of the barriers facing disabled people wanting to access the countryside. However it remains the pivotal consideration. It is important to remember that any barrier, however well-intentioned, will be a barrier to someone. As an example, stiles are sources of despair and injury to walkers, both disabled and non-disabled, the country over. A phased replacement of all stiles nationally is surely long overdue? It is notable that sustainable travel charity Sustrans has a goal to remove or redesign all 16,000 barriers on the National Cycle Network to make it accessible to everyone, with no barriers in place, for continuous travel for everyone.

Other barriers to welcoming disabled people into the countryside can include a lack of accessible information, lack of support, lack of accessible transport and lack of financial resources. Thus it is important to think widely - a countryside manager could foreseeably have the most physically accessible site in the country and yet still have few disabled visitors if other access factors have not been considered.

There is no room for complacency. Improving access is a continuum and it is usually possible to enhance the visitor experience at sites that are already deemed ‘accessible’. Expectations of accessible infrastructure change and what were seen as ‘accessible’ barriers twenty years ago may now be met with scorn. Furthermore, evolving technology means that new developments like audio walks, off-road scooters and hand-cranked trikes are opening up hitherto inaccessible countryside to more disabled people.

Disabilities are legion and everyone is an Individual, so it is important to solicit as wide a range of views as possible. For example, an electric scooter user, however well-intentioned, may have little worthwhile to say on the experiences of someone with agoraphobia or an assistance dog. A truly inclusive approach to access by definition involves considering the needs of everyone.

It is important to listen, rather than presuming to know what disabled people want or need. For example, our tandem cycling clubs are now a cornerstone of our work and yet arose from one chance conversation with a member who sustained a brain injury from a cycling accident as a schoolboy and subsequently wished to cycle again. In trying to accommodate his needs as an individual, we unintentionally spawned something that now benefits hundreds of people each year.

‘Build it and they will come’. It’s true – adopt a positive attitude to inclusive access and you’ll rarely be disappointed! Time and time again we find that sites and organisations that invest time, thought and yes, money in improving access will reap the benefits in increased visitor figures by the disability community. To illustrate, both Redcar and Bridlington on the Yorkshire coast seem to have seen their access enhancement on their seafronts amply rewarded by more and more visitors using wheelchairs.

As we celebrate our 30th Anniversary, Open Country knows there is still much work to be done to achieve a truly accessible countryside. Contact us if you would like to work together. For more information about our work, visit visit www.opencountry.org.uk

The work of Yorkshire Peat Partnership and why it matters

By Lyndon Marquis, Communications Officer

Blanket bog is (in England) an upland peatland habitat, occurring from around 200m upwards, generally on flat or gently sloping ground where drainage is poor. Few plants are adapted to the acidic, infertile conditions found on the deepest peat (which can be several metres in depth) and sphagnum (bog mosses) and cottongrasses predominate. You will also find dwarf-shrubs such as heather, bilberry, cranberry and crowberry, and the carnivorous sundew.

The UK has 13% of the world’s blanket bog, and we estimate Yorkshire holds around 86,377 ha - around 24% of England’s total resource – storing over 38,000 tonnes of carbon. In addition to locking up millennia of carbon, healthy blanket bog helps to slow the flow of water from the uplands into rivers and streams, filters our drinking water and provides habitat for some amazing wildlife. Formed over thousands of years, it has taken just six decades to devastate Yorkshire's peatlands.

Most damage occurred between the 1950s and 1980s, when the government incentivised landowners to drain the land for “agricultural improvement”. Drainage channels – known as grips – were dug across vast tracts of blanket bog, which still criss-cross the landscape today.

The grips drained rainfall off the peat, lowering the water table dramatically. As the condition of the bogs deteriorated, running water gradually started to cut its own channels – gullies – into the habitat. Sphagnum and other peat forming plants struggled to survive in this newly drying environment; over 80% of Yorkshire’s blanket bog has been damaged in this way. As the surface vegetation dried out, the peat underneath was exposed, with two major impacts:

• the carbon stored within the peat was released into the atmosphere
• the peat was washed into the grips and then into our river systems.

As water ran into the grips and gullies, erosion spiralled with more flowing water creating deeper and wider gullies; leaving huge areas of bare, exposed broken peat landscapes.

Yorkshire Peat Partnership began in 2009, as an umbrella organisation led by Yorkshire Wildlife Trust, to try to coordinate the restoration of the badly degraded blanket bog of northern Yorkshire. Since then, we have become the primary organisation coordinating the delivery of upland peatland restoration across the Yorkshire Dales National Park, the North York Moors National Park, Nidderdale Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty, and northern parts of the South Pennines. We are also delivering peatland restoration in parts of Forest of Bowland Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty, and work with other organisations on restoration sites across the North of England. We work closely with landowners, agents, gamekeepers, farmers and contractors to help restore Yorkshire’s internationally important blanket bog.

Restoring this habitat is hard work. Due to restrictions on accessing the land we restore (90% is privately owned), we have to work throughout the autumn and winter. In the wild, remote landscapes in which blanket bog occurs, weather conditions can be extremely harsh and the team must contend with snow, ice and freezing winds.

Before we begin work on restoring an area of peatland, we first need to understand exactly what the damage is and how the landscape works. This includes:

• how water moves on the landscape when it rains
• what vegetation is growing there
• the depth and steepness of the gullies.

We spend a lot of time surveying a restoration site to obtain this information. With permission of the landowner, we go over a site on foot and also use Unmanned Aerial Vehicles to help us capture the data we need.

There are various techniques we use to help a degraded peatland to thrive again, but all restoration comes down to correcting the hydrology. Nothing can happen until we have brought the water table back to the surface.

By blocking grips and gullies, we raise the water table, which helps to re-saturate the land and provide conditions for re-establishing the habitat architect: sphagnum. Over 1,700 kilometres of grips and gullies have been blocked by Yorkshire Peat Partnership so far - more than the distance from Skipton to St Tropez!

We use a variety of materials to block the grips. We prefer to use peat or other material found naturally on peatlands, but sometimes the damage is so extensive that we need to use wood, coir (in the form of “logs”) or stone.

“Hagging” in gullies and grips is a problem – this is when slopes of bare peat are too steeply angled to allow vegetation to grow. We use diggers to “reprofile” these erosion features. This basically means lowering the gradient of the slopes and then covering them with a layer of vegetation. Shallower sloping and surface roughness slow the flow of water which, in turn, slows the rate of erosion and allows plants to recolonise. Our contractors’ diggers have been modified to spread out their weight to exert less ground pressure than a human foot.

We plant a range of sphagnum mosses and cottongrass on the bare peat so it is less vulnerable to erosion. The sphagnum will eventually form more peat, and helps to further slow the flow of rain running off the peatlands, as well as filtering our water.

Yorkshire Peat Partnership is managed by Yorkshire Wildlife Trust – all the staff are Trust employees – in partnership with Yorkshire Water, Natural England, North York Moors National Park Authority, Yorkshire Dales National Park Authority and the Environment Agency with support from the Moorland Association, National Trust, Nidderdale AONB, and the National Farmers Union.

Find out more at yppartnership.org.uk

Playing it Safe

The lure of the great outdoors has never been greater. After months of lockdown people are heading to the coast and countryside for outdoor adventures in ever increasing numbers. This has to be a good thing - the much cited mental and physical benefits don’t need reiterating to us outdoor professionals. Hopefully there are additional benefits to come from greater numbers with a love and respect for our environment. However, at the moment that’s hard to appreciate with social media full of images of litter strewn mountains and beaches and the RNLI / Mountain Rescue / H M Coastguard inundated with call-outs to the unprepared and ill-informed. Which brings me to the question which we have been pondering for the last 4 years - how do we communicate safety in a way that people will take notice?

We’ve spent a lot of time looking at how UK organisations provide their safety information and we’ve looked further afield to see how they do it in Canada, New Zealand and Scandinavia. There is no doubt that the prospect of coming face-to-face with a cougar or grizzly bear tends to get peoples’ attention but unfortunately that is not a card we can play in the UK. Some organisations use number of call-outs and even number of fatalities to encourage people to plan for their trip but there is little evidence that this works - their teams are busier than ever. The truth is that many people are unaware of the potential hazards, unable to assess the risks associated with their chosen adventure and therefore clueless when it comes to knowing what action to take to stay safe. The ‘fear of death’ approach to safety comms can also have the unintended consequence of scaring those who might benefit from it most, into not heading out at all.

Out of all this pondering AdventureSmartWales was born. With the support of Welsh Government, many of the organisations with an interest in outdoor recreation put their combined heads together to take a fresh look at how we talk about safety. Our aim was clear; to reduce the number of avoidable call-outs to emergency services. Not wanting to re-invent the wheel we shamelessly cherry picked the best from the best and together we put together a set of messages which everyone could dip into to ensure that we gave consistent, good advice.

Word got around and in 2018 the Lake District Search and Mountain Rescue Association offered to fund the expansion of AdventureSmart Wales into AdventureSmart UK. AdventureSmart UK isn’t an organisation, it’s a campaign driven by a small team of enthusiastic people, supported by a growing (currently 70+) partnership of outdoor and tourism organisations. Our ask is that our partners work with us to re-think how we talk about safety in the outdoors and adopt the AdventureSmart ethos in their safety comms. Our ambition is that AdventureSmart achieves awareness at a level similar to the Countryside Code, owned by no-one but used by all!

Over the years, clarity has begun to emerge from the fog of safety messaging and AdventureSmart UK is built around the basic premise of whatever your adventure ask yourself 3 questions before you set off......

Do I know what the weather will be like?

As we are all used to in the UK, the weather has the potential to make or spoil your day. This doesn’t have to mean that a spot of drizzle or even a howling gale has to stop us in our tracks. Like a good Scout, being prepared and adapting your plans is the key to being in control of your day. Check the weather forecast – the Met Office is a good place to start.

PS Remember that most unusual occurrence of a cloudless sky can also cause problems (take care to avoid heat stroke!).

Do I have the right gear?

If that question prompts you to ask ‘what is the right gear?’ then you need help! Kit doesn’t need to be expensive but does need to keep you warm and dry and, in the case of boots, needs to fit well; there is nothing like a blister to ruin a good day’s walking! If your adventure involves heading out on the water then a well-fitted and well-maintained buoyancy aid is essential.

Do I have the knowledge and skills for the day?

Adventure allows us to step outside our immediate comfort zone and is a great way to repeatedly rediscover a zest for life. Being AdventureSmart simply means that you are thinking about your own experience and skills. Choosing an adventure that you know that is within you and your companions skillset is part of the fun – and if you want to do something that pushes beyond this, there are many ways to find a guide or instructor to help you.

If you score 3/3 on these questions, off you go, have a fantastic day! If not, go to AdventureSmart.uk to find the answers you need to be kitted up and in the know to be safe!

The benefit of all our partners singing to the same ‘safety hymn sheet’ is that the public gets consistency of messages, delivered in a friendly and positive manner. Another major advantage is that by working with AdventureSmart and by using the #beadventuresmart in your social media, other organisations will help share your messages, potentially reaching new audiences. From Oct 2019 to Feb 2020 #beadventuresmart had a reach of 1.76 million.

There is still a lot of work to be done. Currently we have two regions (Wales and Lake District) who have their own geographically specific information on AdventureSmart.uk; we would love to have other regions join so that we offer a one-stop-shop for safety information in the UK outdoors. We need to look at the data and become more evidence based. At present we take a common sense approach to matching messages to issues but that doesn’t always mean we get it right, for example people might be tripping due to low blood sugar levels rather than inappropriate footwear. Perhaps most importantly of all we would love to see an end to the ‘Safety Information’ tab. Chances are those who need the information most won’t click on it. Let’s work together as an industry to integrate our safety information into our online and printed materials.

If you would like to know more or are interested in becoming an AdventureSmart partner please contact Paul Donovan (escape.routes@btinternet.com) or Emma Edwards-Jones (emma@snowdonia-active.com)