Column: Mary-Ann Ochota
How to get our hills in peak health?
Many of you will have heard of Mend Our Mountains, the campaign from the British Mountaineering Council (BMC) to raise funds for upland and mountain path restoration. The original project in 2016 aimed to raise £100,000 to be spent in national parks across the country. Many of the projects are super-popular routes – the Watkin Path on Snowdon, the Swine Tail Path on Ingleborough, Ringing Roger in the Peak District – and the crowd-funding campaign was a huge success. £103,000 was raised, enabling eight iconic paths to be restored, reducing environmental damage and keeping walkers and riders safe. From motorway-wide erosion scars, to those ankle-breaking ditches that were once walkable routes, damaged paths are not pretty, they’re not nice to walk on and they do huge harm to the fragile ecosystems we head uphill to enjoy.
2018 saw the launch of Mend Our Mountains: Make One Million. It does exactly what it says on the tin – aiming to raise £1,000,000 to be shared between path conservation and repair projects in all 15 of our national parks. It’s a hugely ambitious target, and one that obviously relies on corporate donors as well as us regular folk dipping into our Gore-Tex pockets.
Some people have suggested that fundraising isn’t the right way to support essential conservation work in the national parks. By getting the public to fill the funding gap, perhaps we’re letting the government off the hook. But we willingly donate to mountain rescue, lifeboats and air ambulances. Depending on your politics, it could be quite feasible to think that the government should pay for all that important stuff too. But they don’t. And let’s be practical – public money is tight and likely to stay tight. So if we want to keep our hills healthy and open to all, we need to dig in and show we care.
Other people say they don’t want paths in the mountains. But thin upland soil can’t cope with thousands of boots pounding it to smithereens without help. Good sensitively-constructed paths blend into the hillside and protect vulnerable habitats. Skilled labour and helicopterdropped stone isn’t cheap though – mountain paths can cost upwards of £28,000 per kilometre to build.
So what can you do? Perhaps plan a challenge event (#EverestAnywhere?!) and get folk to donate. Or the next time you head to the hills, pop a quid in a jam jar – and encourage your mates to do the same. If we each ‘paid’ 50p every time we went to a national park, we’d raise millions in a couple of months. And lastly – think about where you go. Seek out the routes less travelled, and explore the lovely bits that aren’t tourist honeypots. If you do get to a bit of path you don’t like the look of, don’t walk directly next to it – strike out a good 50m away at least and forge your own way. Together we can mend our mountains – and proudly hand them over to the next generation in peak health.
“If we want to keep our hills healthy we need to show we care”