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40th Anniversary Celebrations
To celebrate the 40th
anniversary of the founding of our group, members put on a week of walks and
social events. Starting with a morning walk and an afternoon treasure hunt
with sausage sizzle on Saturday 29th August, Sunday’s 12-mile walk was followed
by repeating the original walk starting from Lymington on Bank Holiday Monday.
A cream tea walk and an
evening walk along the sea wall, with supper at a local pub, were interspersed
by longer walks each day, taken from the first book of walks published by the
group in 1992. A luncheon party, attended by 60 people including several
original members on Saturday 5th September, was followed in the evening by a
well-attended Barn Dance, both held at Sway Village Hall.
The week ended with a
breakfast walk from Longslade Bottom and a walk and party in Sway for families
with young children, who walk once a month.
Total attendance throughout
the week’s 14 events was in excess of 350 people, many attending more than half
- a very satisfactory outcome for all who worked so hard.
Stream Crossings in and around the New
Forest
 For several years members of the
New Forest Group have complained about a number of “dodgy” stream crossings on
Crown Lands and elsewhere in the Forest, but very little has been done to
improve any of them. Many footpaths are shown on the Ordnance Survey maps
and they have been open to the public “from time immemorial”. Most of the
ground in the Forest is soft and boggy by nature, so Ramblers expect to have to
wear boots to walk all year round in reasonable comfort, but that should be
sufficient for most weather conditions. Sadly it isn't, especially in
valley bottoms where there are often few or no places to cross a stream or a bog
safely.
 The situation has deteriorated
slowly but steadily over the last ten and more years, as horse-riding has
increased and the Forestry Commission has been dissuaded from remedying erosion
by conservation interests.
We don't want to see any further
proliferation of gravel tracks, but several stream and bog crossings need urgent
attention. Often the measures needed are minor works, like putting a pipe, or
sometimes two, in the stream bed with the bank of earth and gravel over it.
With this in mind, a preliminary list of locations where improvements are needed
has been drawn up. (Click
here
to view the list.) All walkers are invited to take digital photographs of
impassable stream crossings with the date and location (grid reference) and send
it to the e-mail address below.
Site visits to a handful of
specimen sites with representatives of the Environment Agency, the National Park
Authority and the Forestry Commission have been made to discuss their statutory
and non-statutory requirements, and Natural England plus the Verderers will also
have an important say. Hence it isn't going to be an easy matter to get
the necessary permissions, bearing in mind the very strong conservation
regulations applicable. Of course, Ramblers are conservation-minded, and
preserving an air of wildness and potential adventure is important to us, so we
don't want to convert the Forest into a suburban park as some have wrongly
suggested. However, at present, the condition of some footpaths is
deplorable.
Let us have your
photographs and your views please to John
Thackray:
e-mail
je@thackray.org
4 Elm Avenue,
Christchurch BH23 2HJ (Sorry,
phone calls won’t help on this subject.)
Hampshire
footpaths
Can
you think of anywhere that the footpath network could be improved in the New
Forest area?
It
could be any improvement, such as
where a new link could improve accessibility to an area, or where a route along
a road could be replaced by a track in adjacent land.
If
you have any suggestions please contact our Footpaths Secretary by clicking
here.
 A35 stiles
For those planning a walk which crosses the A35
between Bank and Wilverley
Post, the following information on stiles and gates could be useful. Click
here for the Ordnance Survey map of the area, and click
here for
details of exact location. To view a photo of each stile, please click
here.
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