Calne Without Parish Council has just restarted it’s Footpaths Working Group. The original aim was to audit all of the rights of way within the parish to determine their current state, and then work with the landowners and Wiltshire Council to rectify the problems found. In hindsight this was never going to work as Calne Without is the largest parish by area in Wiltshire (at 43 sq km) and has around 80 km (around 50 miles) of public rights of way (16 km of bridleways, 63 km of footpaths and 0.5 km of byways). The new approach is to ask residents to highlight issues when they are using the rights of way and then the parish council will review the issues and produce a prioritised list of areas to tackle. This could include forming working parties to remediate some areas and / or writing to landowners for them to clear paths, for example.
The best way to report issues is via the MyWilts online reporting system (https://www.wiltshire.gov.uk/mywilts-online-reporting) . Click on the “report it” tab and then follow links for footpaths / public rights of way. You can click on a map showing indicating where the problem is and upload photos too. If you would prefer me to do it, reply to this post below with the details and I will be in touch. (when you reply below by default your comments will not be made public, only I can see them).
The parish council can extract data from this tool to update our list.
At the moment there is a big backlog of issues with public rights of way. Please don’t assume that someone else has reported a problem when you come across one – if you use the online tool you will see on the map if anyone else has reported the issue.
Let me know if you have any questions or comments.
Doug Price