Mend Our Mountains: meet ranger Liam from Fix the Fells
If you're a BMC member or if you have made a donation to the BMC Access & Conservation Trust (ACT), you are directly supporting our Mend Our Mountains campaign which is funding Fix the Fells again this year. Your contributions enable rangers like Liam Prior to consistently repair and manage the Lake District paths that we love to walk on. We caught up with Liam on the very popular path up Scafell Pike from Wasdale Head to find out what a typical day in his life is like - it's quite demanding!
What does your typical day look like?
We're a team of four that meet in an office on the way into Wasdale at seven in the morning. We get our gear together, jump in a vehicle and we're normally walking up onto the fells before eight. We've got a work programme lined out and normally there's a big, ongoing project on Scafell Pike. So at the moment we're up at about 700m elevation, which takes about an hour's walking. So we tend to get to site for about nine-ish, have a quick cup of coffee and put our waterproofs on - it's normally raining!
Lately we've been doing some upland footpath repair, in this case stone pitching, making a nice wide path that will hopefully cope with the numbers of people that want to access Scafell Pike. About three in the afternoon, we start packing up because it's about an hour back down and then a drive back out of the valley to get back to base for five-ish.
What skills do you need?
A love of the outdoors. A passion for why you're doing what you do and a desire to protect the landscape that you're working in. A good sense of humour. And some problem solving. No two days are the same. I studied environment, ecology and economics, and then I got into practical conservation work through volunteering and other jobs before starting with the National Trust in 2014.
Your favourite part of the job?
I think it is just the satisfaction that, at the end of the day, you can see what you've done and that you know you're protecting a fragile landscape and providing a sustainable route into the high fells.
Your current projects?
We're on one of the main routes up Scafell Pike from the village green at Wasdale Head, one of the more popular parts in the Lake District. This means that when we get pinch points in the path, often people spread out and cause trampling on side routes. So what we do in those situations is we try to make the path a little bit better, a little bit more resilient so that more people can follow it. And then we try and block off the side routes. We also improved the drainage and better defined the path, which should mean that the routes are more sustainable for users to access the fells. So this work and other bits of work further up the path, were done with BMC volunteers as part of the Get Stuck In days.
Further up, in the 1980’s the path went straight over Brown Tongue to Hollowstones and it was massively braided and eroded. After the erosion grew in the 1980s and 1990s, more and more sections of pitching were installed until the path from Lingmell Gill to Hollowstones was a near continuous stretch of stone pitching. This incredible work was carried out by highly skilled professionals over many years and is now maintained by the consistent work of Fix the Fells staff and volunteers, and supported with funding over the years from the BMC Access & Conservation Trust's Mend Our Mountains campaign.
Your favourite project?
The project I'm most proud of that we've been working on with Fix the Fells is the ongoing restoration and maintenance of Brown Tongue. To think that 30-35 years later people will still be working on that path and, more importantly, people will still be walking on that path, I think is a resounding success and something that we should all be very proud of.
Challenges of the role?
I think the most challenging aspect of my role as a ranger at Fix the Fells is the planning. There are areas of our patch that could really do with some work to improve their condition, but we just don't have the funding. We don't have the resources to work everywhere. So how do you choose where to work and where not to work?
Because there are so few people that work or volunteer for Fix the Fells, carrying out upland footpath repair, I'm unsure how many people know that it's required or even that there are people out doing this work. So if you're reading this, have a look the next time you're out on the fells for organisations and charities up and down the country working in areas like this. I'm not sure how many people are aware what goes into footpath repair and maintenance. So next time you're out for a walk, have a look around and see if you notice something that we've mentioned here.
Why is it important to fix the fells?
It's important to fix the fells because they are fragile habitats and they take a battering from the weather. Erosion from footfall is a problem because the soils are slow to accumulate and once they're gone, they tend to end up in the watercourses and eventually in Wastwater, which upsets the delicate ecosystem there. If we fix the fells by providing a more clearly defined path, improving the drainage and providing a sustainable surface to walk on, then we can minimise the damage caused and give nature a chance to thrive in such fantastic landscapes.
How can we help?
The funding from the BMC's Access & Conservation Trust enables us to continue working in such beautiful landscapes. Scafell Pike has hundreds of thousands of visitors every year, and it's a really fragile mountain environment that they're accessing. For us to have some funds, when we rely on donations, enables us to year on year, build on what we've done in previous years to hopefully get the route into a sustainable condition.
We have a ranger called Iain who leads our volunteers. He's out with them 2-3 times a month. I maybe get out with them once a month and it's a fantastic part of the job. I'd recommend volunteering to anyone. If you like the fresh air, you like a bit of physical exertion and you want to put something back into these precious landscapes, I'd recommend you give it a try.
WATCH: Fix the Fells ranger Liam shows us the Mend Our Mountains successes on Scafell Pike
Support the BMC ACT Mend Our Mountains campaign
Path repair is a surprisingly costly business. Working in remote locations with complex equipment and adverse weather conditions makes rebuilding trails an enormous and expensive challenge.
Every £1 helps and no donation is too small:
- £5 buys a pair of work gloves
- £10 buys a replacement handle for a mattock
- £25 buys a shovel or suncream & midge repellent for a ranger team
- £50 buys five garden skips for moving soil
- £150 buys protective clothing for path repairers
- £250 fixes approximately one metre of footpath
- £1000 flies ten bags of stone to an inaccessible mountain location
Support the Mend Our Mountains campaign from the BMC's Access & Conservation Trust to help Fix the Fells rangers like Liam repair and maintain the Lake District fells.
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