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 tarmacked 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 general absence 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 leave the track and seek their thrills on the more exciting terrain that
they can now reach. In some areas –
Blubberhouses Moor is a good example – large areas of open moorland have been
turned into what look like moto-cross circuits, stripped bare of vegetation by
the repeated passage, round and round, of the vehicles. And wherever a steep and challenging hillside
adjoins a track, vehicles will leave the track in search of the thrills that
steep gradients give their users.
The sheer number of off-roader vehicles is now 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 to 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
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