The Area and its Problems
The
Nobody knows precisely how many green lanes in the Dales are legally open
to motor vehicles. This may seem strange, but English highway law is obscure
and intractable. When national parks were founded, back in 1949, it was envisaged
that the network of green lanes, which until then had carried chiefly local,
agricultural vehicular traffic, would sink gently back into the landscape
and would be used only by farmers, cyclists, horse-riders and pedestrians.
Highway authorities were expected to concentrate their efforts on maintaining
the tarmacademed motor roads, and to apply to the unsealed green lanes only
the minimal maintenance necessary for the classes of users that were envisaged.
However – and this is where a great opportunity to protect the countryside
was missed – vehicular rights on the green lanes were never formally extinguished.
So, with the advent of modern recreational motor vehicles, the network of
green lanes became vulnerable to claims that, because the lanes were once
open to horses and carts, they are still legally open to convoys of 4x4s and
motor-bikes.
The NERC Act goes a long way toward ending the archaic rule that said that if a horse and cart, centuries ago, legally used a route, 4x4s and motorbikes can use it now. But the NERC Act does not solve the problem completely. There are still miles and miles of green lanes that are still vulnerable to motors. There is still plenty of work for YDGLA to do.
Just how many green lanes in the Dales will eventually have to be recognised as bearing rights for motor vehicles is unclear. First, in the National Park, there are already approximately 31 kms of byways (BOATs) that certainly bear motor vehicular rights. Secondly, in both the Park and the AONB there are pending applications, submitted by vehicle users, that may be exempt from the provisions of the new NERC Act, and which therefore might result in further BOATs. Each of these applications has to be determined by lengthy and costly legal and historical enquiries, and at these enquiries, no account may be taken of the lanes’ beauty or of their capacity to withstand the passage of motor vehicles. Lastly, there is a network of over a hundred kilometres of tracks known as ‘unclassified county roads’ (UCRs) that are extremely vulnerable to demands by motor users. The precise rights of way status of UCRs is unclear – that is why they are called ‘unclassified’ – and until the status of the routes are established, case by case, vehicle user groups will insist that they are entitled to use them.
The problem of illegal off-roading is intractable too. The uncertainty of the legal status of many routes, coupled with the diffculties of police enforcement, gives many recreational vehicle users the confidence to go pretty much where they please. It is now commonplace to find motor vehicles nosing down any inviting track, or traversing the high fells, well away from any track at all. At any point where a typical green lane is not bounded on either side by walls, it is likely that many 4x4s and motorbikes will seek their thrills on the more exciting terrain beside the track. In some areas – Blubberhouses Moor is a good example – large areas of open moorland were turned into what looked like moto-cross circuits, stripped bare of vegetation by the repeated passage, round and round, of motorbikes. And wherever a steep and challenging hillside adjoins a track, vehicle users will leave the track in search of the thrills that steep gradients give them. (Blubberhouses Moor, we are pleased to say, now has a traffic regulation order on it, prohibiting recreational vehicles.)
The sheer number of off-roader vehicles is oppressive. Off-roading is not a minor, fringe activity, restricted to just a few enthusiasts, using just a tiny handful of routes, on low-powered machines. On one day in 2002, for example, over a hundred motorcycles were counted on the green lane that descends from Deadman’s Hill, into Coverdale, from Nidderdale. It is now common to see vans or trailers parked at the roadside with motor-bikes, used expressly for off-roading, being unloaded and ridden off into the hills. And because the fell-sides in the Dales are predominantly tree-less, the noise of off-road vehicles echoes for miles, disturbing the peace and tranquility that the National Park and the AONB were set up to preserve. The damage to the tracks themselves, as anyone who has seen the green lanes at first hand will know, is shameful. The NERC Act may have brought a reduction in the numbers of off-roaders in the Dales, but there are still plenty of motor-cyclists and 4x4 users whose idea of a good day out in the Dales is to ride and drive their vehicles along green lanes.
Some examples of the problems.
Moorhead lane, looking westward across to Helwith Bridge. These photos were taken from exactly the
same spot in Ribblesdale, ten years
apart (1989 and 1999). Agricultural use
of this lane has remained constant during this decade. The number of off-road vehicles has sharply
risen. The consequence is plain: in some
places the surface of the track has been cut down more than a metre below the
1989 level.
Motorcycles in Dentdale.
Off-roaders' assertion that the damage to the green lanes is not caused by them
is plainly false.
Recreational vehicular damage to