Free access to the countryside for all

PETER Astman writes of his disappointment regarding the National Trust’s stewardship of Brean Down in Somerset. Sadly, the same state and lack of care was evident at South Milton Sands, Devon.

In summer the bins are overflowing with rubbish and the toilets are a disgrace with “liquid” covering the floor and sometimes flowing out the door of both the men’s and ladies’ toilets. The cafe there is very popular but they have no toilets of their own, so the customers are reliant on public loos.

I wrote to the NT (who received £682 million last year) a while back, after they changed the parking from summer daytime to 365 days a year, 24/7 and put the prices up.

Six pounds a day in summer is expensive but just about bearable – but £3 during winter? A lot for a walk along the beach.

I thought that with all the cash they were making from the car park – many thousands per day probably – that they could afford to do a bit more to make sure that the toilets were clean and the rubbish from bin bags ripped open by seagulls left lying by the toilets was not allowed to blow down the track, and maybe a few more signs encouraging people to keep control of and clean up after their dogs.

Their response was a sloping shoulders one – the toilets and bins are the council’s responsibility, they said, and their car parking receipts are used for the restoration and upkeep of NT properties in other parts of the country. As for the dogs, well, apparently it was the public’s responsibility to find out whose dog it was and then tell the owner off.

This seems to me unreasonable. The NT advertises South Milton on its website, along with the facilities of a cafe and toilet, as dog friendly, encouraging people to visit, but they take absolutely no responsibility for the mess that the extra visitors make, it seems.

I don’t know if the NT makes any donation to the council towards the upkeep of the services it relies on. It didn’t say it did but I certainly think it should.

So there we have it! Here in Devon, where we have a lot of poverty and deprivation and a wide disparity of incomes, we are expected to be cash cows for the rest of the country as far as the NT is concerned. We don’t have much in the way of amenity here in the South West apart from the countryside but now we are increasingly made to pay every time we step outside our door and what’s more made to pay through our rates for the mess that other visitors bring.

I don’t know about you but I am fed up with the National Trust monetising every bit of our beautiful landscape then charging us a not insubstantial sum to visit unless one is well off enough to afford the National Trust tax – aka the yearly membership of a hundred and fifty quid. Meanwhile, ordinary less welloff people are denied visiting what’s on their own doorstep.

If the NT must charge, then maybe the NT should adopt the system they have in Spain, where admission to these beach or nature reserves is free for locals. We have stopped going to South Milton which is a shame but we can’t afford it with all the other cost-of-living increases.

Many years back I left provision in my will for a donation to the NT. Not now. I think I’ll leave my cash to Right to Roam, who campaign for free access to the countryside for all.

Paul Whiteley Bittaford, Devon