Your Host Group: White Cliffs

The White Cliffs group have kept up the momentum from last year and have again had a productive year. This would not be possible without the dedication and time given by our volunteers who have enabled us to achieve the successes listed below. A huge thank you to you all.

Our membership is slightly down with 470 members this year compared with 480 in 2023. We have had 58 new members join this year but unfortunately several of our members have passed away and some members have resigned or moved away.

We have offered an amazing 142 walks, most of them being on a Thursday or Sunday with additional walks on some Saturdays and Tuesdays. Currently we have 31 walk leaders and have continued to encourage new walk leaders through our Walk Leaders' Forum. White Cliffs Walking Week was held in July; not as grand as the festival but a success still with walks offered throughout Kent every day for a week. We have also offered shorter walks this year, 2 to 3 miles, to encourage new walkers and give confidence to those that may be apprehensive about joining a walk.

Our footpath volunteer network continues to grow. This has been a successful year for recruiting Public Footpath Observers (PFOs), only one out of our 53 parishes lacks a PFO. It has been a busy year for Local Footpath Officers as there have been more building proposals than usual. We need more LFO volunteers! There are a number of positions vacant in the Swingfield-Lyminge-Elham area, please get in touch if you wish to find out more. The Vegetation Clearance Team have continued their hard work with five regular volunteers going out most weeks. This year's notable tasks were being requested by KCC to clear the coastal path at Kingsdown (ER9) and maintaining the Kearsney Loop twice where we put several of the marker posts back in place.

We also got involved with clearing some Thanet area paths for the annual pilgrimage walk organised by L'Arche Kent community in July.

Finally, Committee members are volunteering to host our group holidays which are proving to be very popular. We have offered three holidays this year: the New Forest in April, Church Stretton in June and Majorca in October. I would like to congratulate the group members for making the holidays a welcoming and enjoyable experience for everybody. The encouragement and kindness you show to each other is what the Ramblers is all about. A good year in all, thank you again to the White Cliffs Ramblers' group members and our volunteers for your continued support.

Lost Ways and Missed Opportunities

I expect most of you know that the definitive maps, drawn up in the decades after 1950 in the hope of creating a reliable record of our beloved rights of way, were far from complete -- although more complete in Kent than in some other parts of the country. I expect you know also that in 2000 the then government promised to get all the omitted routes onto the definitive map by 31 December 2025, after which any in existence before 1949 and not yet added to the map would be extinguished.

What followed has been a sorry tale. The government had grossly underestimated the difficulty of identifying the omitted routes and in 2008 gave up, handing the task over to volunteers. It then set up a group representing stakeholders such as walkers and equestrians (and landowners) to advise on new legislation to ease the process. Successive governments have dilly-dallied, ignoring the stakeholder recommendations and leaving councils starved of the resources to deal with volunteers' applications to have routes added to the map. The government in Wales saw sense and agreed to abolish the 31 December 2025 cut off date for unrecorded paths in the Principality. Eventually the British government followed suit for English paths only to reverse its decision and instead simply defer the cut-off date by five years. This deferral is hopelessly inadequate to compensate for the lost years up to 2008 and the decade-long delay in implementing the stakeholder recommendations and to recognise how grossly the effort required to record all omitted paths had been underestimated when the original deadline was set. The slowness of local councils to process applications means that many volunteers will be long dead by the time the applications they have submitted are dealt with -- a disgraceful way for a government to treat volunteers who have selflessly and often at great sacrifice taken on a task that civil servants found too difficult.

One must never give up the fight and I am pleased to say that the Kent Countryside Access Forum, an independent statutory body representing the interests of countryside users (including landowners), has just written to the Secretary of State seeking abolition of the cut-off date in England. This is the second time of writing by the Forum -- their previous plea some years ago was followed by an announcement that the cut-off would be abolished but, as indicated above, a U-turn followed. We hope for a similar outcome this time (but without the U-turn). The letter can be found on the Forum website under the heading "Correspondence" and we have provided a link on our News page: www.kentramblers.org.uk/news

If you would like to learn more about the potentially dire consequences of the cut-off date for routes that we currently use, please have a look at the article beginning on page 22 of last year's Annual Review. Perhaps you will be motivated to write to your MP in support of the Forum's request, in which case we would much appreciate a copy (to prow@kentramblers.org.uk).