Mend Our Mountains: BMC volunteers make repairs to 100m of Lake District footpath
This August, 14 BMC volunteers spent two days on The Band in Langdale, Lake District, making repairs to a 100m stretch of footpath in the latest Get Stuck In event, funded by the Mend Our Mountains campaign from the BMC's Access & Conservation Trust.
The volunteers worked in pairs and small teams, with Fix the Fells rangers advising, teaching and helping with the hard graft. Drainage ditches were created and restored, braided and eroded paths were narrowed and blocked off, and stone stairways were painstakingly dug into place.
If you are a member of the BMC or if you have supported the Mend Our Mountain campaign from the BMC's Access & Conservation Trust, this is what your generous donations are enabling us to do.
Leading our Get Stuck In events is BMC Hill Walking Rep volunteer extraordinaire, Steve Charles. "Today we're working on an area called The Band, which leads up to Bowfell," he says. "It's a very heavily used path so there's lots of erosion. What we're doing as volunteers, with help and guidance from the Fix the Fells rangers, is trying to make the path more sustainable. Where there's water running down the track and eroding it, we're creating drainage gullies which help direct water off the path. There's also one team making a section of resilient rock steps, and more teams landscaping - making humps and hollows to keep people on to the path without walking off to the side and widening it, causing more erosion."
BMC volunteers give back
Steve continues, "Since the Get Stuck In projects started a couple of years ago, BMC volunteers have done well over 500 hours of work in the hills. That's a huge impact on the mountain environment. We hope that, over time, this is going to be a movement that grows, and we can provide more and more events. Then more and more people can 'Get Stuck In' and do more and more work to help 'Mend Our Mountains'.
"Many people in this group will regularly be going into the mountains, either walking, scrambling or climbing, and I myself have been going into the mountains for quite a long time. So, it's great to be able to give back and to feel that you are helping to preserve this environment for future generations, because it is under threat. You need to give it tender loving care. It needs to be nurtured because if we don't do anything, then it's going to be in a much poorer state when we hand it on."
We need your help!
This vital footpath repair work wouldn't be possible without volunteers and funding according to Volunteer Development Ranger Matt Tweed from Fix the Fells. "The BMC volunteers are absolutely invaluable in helping us to look after the Lake District," he says. "We've got a good, big team here so we're going to get a huge chunk of work done over the next two days. Imagine if there were only us four rangers toiling away at this - it would take much, much longer. Having the help of the BMC volunteers coming along and really knocking off a good stretch of repair work, it helps us move the project on and to look after the paths now and for the future.
"Before Fix the Fells was formed in 2001, the paths across the Lake District were were getting in a pretty bad shape. There were erosion scars 20-30m wide and five metres deep in places. All that material was getting washed into the rivers and down into the lakes. So without the work that we've been doing over the past 20 years or so, that erosion, combined with the increased number of visitors and more extreme weather events, that erosion would be getting worse and worse. The work that we are doing to stabilise and slow down those rates of erosion are absolutely crucial."
"The best way to help Fix the Fells look after the Lake District paths is to either volunteer with the BMC's Lake District Get Stuck In events and/or donate. We have no statutory funding at all - we rely on public support. So if you like walking in the fells; if you love this landscape, donations are absolutely key."
It's hard work, but fun
BMC volunteers come from all walks of life, but one thing you can guarantee is that they are all absolutely brilliant, lovely and hard-working people.
This was Mike Borne's first experience volunteering for the BMC. He says, "I read about the Get Stuck In events in Summit magazine and thought 'Why wouldn't you want to spend two days out in the hills, meeting some like-minded people in the sun and fresh air - what's not to like?' All you need is a pair of gardening gloves, a pair of steel-toed safety boots [which you can borrow from Fix the Fells]. I'm loving the work. I definitely, 100% will be back to do this again."
Beth Craigen does a lot of volunteer work introducing newcomers to the outdoors, but this is her first time repairing footpaths as a BMC member. "I get volunteering leave from work and I wanted to do something to make a difference in the outdoors," she says. "It's nice to give back to the paths because we do bring groups up and do lots of walking. It's nice to feel useful and it's good getting away from a computer and being sat at a desk all day. The work is hard because it's muscles you don't use very often, but it's actually really good, and it's nice working in a team - we're all taking it in turn to do different things. It's just a different type of hard work I think! It's great fun, I'm meeting loads of people I would never normally have met, which is really cool."
BMC member David Delahunty has previously volunteered to plant sphagnum moss and clear invasive rhododendrons from the Peak District on the single-day Get Stuck In events and this is his first time on these two-day work parties. "As somebody who has been going to the Lake District for many years, I jumped at the chance to give a bit back to an environment that's given me so much pleasure, for over 40 years. I enjoy volunteering because you're in a beautiful environment, getting a lot of exercise, you're outside, you're learning new skills, you meet great people who have all got different and interesting backgrounds, and through volunteering I've made some very good friends. It ticks a lot of boxes for me and I would encourage anyone who's thinking about it to give it a go because I'm sure you'll really enjoy it."
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.
- £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 BMC's Access & Conservation Trust Mend Our Mountains campaign to help projects like Get Stuck In repair and maintain the landscapes you love to walk and climb in.
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