I sympathise with the correspondent who, in a letter published
in these columns last week, criticised the complex nature of the duties now laid on parish councils with regard to the surveying and main- tenance of rights of way. Few rural communities that I know of have any difficulty in keeping open the public footpaths that they still use, and the diversion of effort needed to reopen those which have fallen into disuse, though not perhaps very large, belongs to a tidying-up stage which the state of communications in rural areas is very far from having reached. The number of farmers wholly or in part dependent on roads whose upkeep the local highway authority either disclaims responsibility for or merely never gets around to must be very large. The lane or track which is their life- line was never meant to stand up to the daily visitations of the milk-lorry ; and on farms which were once part of an estate the chances are that in the last ten years army traffic or timber extraction or both have reduced what used to be private roads to a string of pot-holes over which the farmer's vehicles bump expensively in bottom gear. The two things are not, of course, connected in any way ; but to open up footpaths for the week-end rambler before you do anything about the farmer's by-roads seems to me rather unrealistic planning. The subject is one on which a good many country doctors (or vets) would probably have something to say.
* * * *
Previous page
