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Recreational impact on treasured landscapes - managing footpaths in the uplands.
The National Trust for Scotland has in its care over 100,000 acres of Scotland's finest scenic heritage, including some of the most famous and accessible mountains in Scotland. These include Ben Lomond, Ben Lawers, Goatfell, and the mountains of Glencoe, Kintail and Torridon. These mountain ranges attract vast numbers of mountaineers and
hill walkers. The upsurge of car ownership in the 1960s encouraged the first wave of city people to take to the hills in any numbers and the more recent development of Munro bagging as a sport in its own right has increased and concentrated visitor use on mountains over 3,000 feet. This ever increasing pressure on a fragile environment has had many very obvious and harmful consequences on the landscape value of many of our mountains.
The toll of boots on thin turf soon leads to the upper protective crust of vegetation being worn away. The feet of thousands of visitors in all seasons on fragile, upland properties eventually wear through the ground surface. Once the vegetation has been broken, water begins to wash out the soil and paths will degenerate into loose scree or impassable liquid peat. Walkers then bypass the problem area, widening the scar as the fragile vegetation on either side of the damaged ground starts to get worn away, beginning the process all over again. And so the resultant new path causes the mountainside scar to get wider and wider. It is the extreme conditions that face Scotland's mountains, in terms of high rainfall and little protective cover from snow in winter, that makes the problem so much more difficult to manage in comparison with other more continental mountain ranges such as the Alps.
The first principle is to drain water away, following which a proper surface can be created, using locally worn materials. A well-repaired path will attract walkers back on to it and allow the surrounding damaged ground to recover.
Perhaps then it is all too easily to take upland access for granted and to imagine that 'nothing needs to be done'. But beneath the tread of walkers lie the results of many hours of skilled work by volunteer and specialist teams. This highly skilled and physically demanding work is largely carried out by a specialist team of footpath contractors, aided by the Trust's Conservation Volunteers. If the work is successful it will be well-nigh invisible.
The National Trust for Scotland first appreciated the scale of its footpath and landscape erosion problem during the 1970s. Between around 1975 and 1985 the Trust relied solely on the services of one or two dedicated countryside rangers and its band of tireless Conservation Volunteers. Whilst they carried out considerable good work that prevented the erosion problem getting much worse, between them they simply did not have the resources of strength, skill and time to make a serious impression on the problem of increasing landscape erosion. Meantime, the Countryside Commission for Scotland realised in the mid 1980s the scale of footpath erosion throughout Scotland. They set up a special upland footpath project, under Dr Robert Aitken, and his conclusion was that new professional footpath repair teams needed to be established to make any serious impression on the expanding problem.
In 1985 he established, on a trial basis, the first ever professional footpath repair team in Scotland; this team ran for about two years before being taken over by Scottish Conservation Projects, who in turn established a free-standing contracting service, called Pathcraft Limited.
At first Dr Aitken's team had little opportunity to work on most of Scotland's footpaths, as there was little interest being shown by the majority of Scotland's landowners. Fortunately, the National Trust for Scotland was well aware, by then, of the urgency of this work and was very enthusiastic to support the newly emerging footpath teams. They first worked on National Trust for Scotland ground at Glencoe in 1986. In this work the Trust has been very generously supported by a number of funding bodies. Up until 1992 the main sponsor was the Countryside Commission for Scotland and since then their role has been taken over by the new public agency, Scottish Natural Heritage. These organisations have been able to offer grants towards footpath contracts and there is little doubt that the Trust would have been able to carry out its major repair programmes without this financial support. Another contributing body is the Scottish Mountaineering Trust and also commercial sponsors have begun to show an interest in this work e.g. Royal Bank of Scotland funding towards the repair of Ben Lomond.
The Trust is fully committed to maintaining expenditure on mountain footpath repair. This huge capital investment is in fact a catching up process - we are paying for accrued footpath maintenance which has not been carried out for perhaps a hundred years, going back to a period when deer stalking emerged in Scotland as a major land use and stalkers paths were created and maintained out of the stalking season. It is important not only to maintain capital investment but also to ensure that in the years ahead we do not allow the maintenance of improved paths to slip. This is one of the major challenges for the future.