By John Knox
Our increasingly wet and stormy weather is eroding Scotland’s 10,000 miles of pathways, according to Scottish Natural Heritage (SNH). So how about a job creation scheme to repair and extend them? It would be the best £200 million ever spent, and would leave Scotland with something positive from the great recession.
SNH has just published a study of the impact of climate change on the network of paths and trails that criss-cross Scotland. It found that snow in winter and heavy rain in summer is causing scouring on the paths on Lochnagar and Beinn Alligin and deep ruts on Ben Lawers.
The Fife coastal path, the John Muir Way in East Lothian and the John O’ Groats path are suffering from tidal erosion and storm surges. Riverside paths on the Spey, the Clyde, the Tyne, the Esk and the Almond are being regularly flooded. The West Highland Way on the east side of Loch Lomond is also subject to flooding and landslips. And high winds have caused the fine surface material to blow away on the path up Ben Lomond and have brought down trees across the Lion’s Face path near Braemar.
The study concludes: “Unfortunately, the current funding regime of capital investment with limited or non-existent funds for aftercare, particularly of upland paths, is not conducive to adapting to climate change.”
The funding regime ended altogether on Ben Nevis, with the result that the Nevis Partnership has had to cease operations. It has spent £3m on improvements to the “donkey path” that takes 150,000 tourists to the top each year. And plans for £2.5m more work have had to be ditched.
This is all a great shame, because paths are an important part of what we now call “infrastructure”. They always have been. They were among the first pieces of infrastructure our ancestors built – paths from the shore to the village, to the fields, to the well or river, to the stone circle. They have formed the routes for our roads and they now take us out into the countryside without having to scramble across fields or through deep bracken or heather. They give us exercise and beauty.
So why don’t we use the current shortage of jobs – 250,000 of them – to create work for at least some people by restoring these damaged paths and building new ones? They cost just £100 a metre. If each council in Scotland was given just £6m (on average), they could employ all of the 6,700 youngsters who have had no work for the last six months and set them to building or repairing 2,000km of pathways.
We are well behind the rest of the UK and Europe in path kilometres. Our 16,000km network is less than half the figure in England. Norway has 18,000km and the state of Baden-Württemberg in Germany has 45,000km.
And where, you may ask, will the money come from to build all these new pathways? Scrapping the new Forth Bridge, of course. The pathways programme would use up just one-seventh of the £1.5 billion that the bridge is going to cost. And we would have money left over to build six new schools, 7,000 council houses, and even finish off the Edinburgh trams. Think of all the jobs that would produce.
Think too of the benefits of giving Scotland a network of well-maintained, well-signposted paths, working our way out of recession and turning us into a cycling and walking nation.
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