Kate Ashbrook

A council which is bottom of the league for its footpaths must try harder.

That was the uncompromising message from Ramblers’ Association chairman Kate Ashbrook at the weekend when she slammed Cornwall’s authority for neglecting the county’s major asset: its footpaths. She told a gathering at Goldsithney that visitors walking the coastal path bring in £300m to the local economy.

But Cornwall County Council is ignoring half its network of paths and spending too little on one of its best assets.

Ms Ashbrook, head of the 140,000-member association, told the annual meeting of the RA’s Penwith-Kerrier group: “Cornwall’s 3,000 miles of public paths are the greatest income generator the county has.

“We know that visitors walking the coast path bring a massive £300 million a year into the region. If all of Cornwall’s paths were in good order, the county would benefit enormously.

“Sadly, however, there are still countless paths which are unusable, because they are blocked, overgrown, lack signposts and waymarks, or have difficult stiles and gates. In the latest condition survey, carried out by the county council itself, Cornwall came bottom of the league for shire counties, with a shameful two in five paths not easy to use. And this is in a county which relies on tourism for its existence!”

In 2005, she said, the council budgeted £2.01m for the footpath network, to be spent over three years. But Ms Ashbrook said a further £5.8m needs to be spent to bring the paths up to national standards.

She told the Ramblers group on Saturday: “Of great concern is that the council assigns the paths into categories of gold, silver and bronze, with only the gold ones getting attention. On the basis of a network survey carried out for the council in 2004, at a cost of about £130,000, the council thought that the £2.01m would enable about half the network to be treated as gold. It was clear then that the remaining half would be underfunded and ignored.

“The council has since found that the survey underestimated the scale of the problems. In consequence the planned programme of work has had to be curtailed to fit the budget; many paths originally classed as gold are now classed as silver or bronze and significantly more than half the network remains underfunded and ignored. All walkers are in consequence denied the right to use and enjoy many of the paths in Cornwall, even though they are highways in law.

“The Ramblers will keep up its campaign to get Cornwall’s paths properly resourced and reopened for everyone to enjoy.”

The meeting, near Marazion, was preceded by a 6½km (four-mile) walk.