The long path to victory

If you’ve lived in the Village for a while you may remember when Stepping Stones Nursery was sited at the back of the Primary School. In 2016 it was moved to a nice new temporary building on the School playing field next to the Rec.

This had the unfortunate side-effect of funnelling a lot of foot traffic between the two sites, with deep and impassible mud trenches.

After this continued, year after year for 6 years I realised I needed to act. My first task was to find out who owned the land, and who was responsible for it’s upkeep. Being a Parish Councillor is often a thankless task, but does mean you get to meet with your County and District Councillors. I spoke to our County Councillor Rachel Hood a few times before Parish Council meetings through the first half of 2022 but she wasn’t sure that the authority laid with her, and offered to find out. After a few months of this I decided to do some digging myself. I was fairly certain that the land fell under the County Council in it’s role as the Local Education Authority. It took some digging but luckily with the renewal of planning permission for Stepping Stones just the right piece of evidence came out – a planning map clearly showing the path was within the ‘red line’ boundary of the site, so I could prove it was County Council land.

Now I knew who owned the land, but convincing them to pay for a path required proving there was an obligation. This is where the Definitive Map of Rights of Way comes in handy. This document shows all public roads, paths and bridal ways. It clearly showed the section between the school and the Nursery was a public footpath. Just the ticket!

Armed with this, and the knowledge that Rachel Hood is not only our County Councillor, but also County Cabinet member for Education I let her know that I had concrete evidence that she was indeed the person who had responsibility to get this sorted, and that she had an obligation to do so. To her credit – in the face of this evidence a contractor was quickly found, and the works carried out within a couple of months. (But not without a few more emails from me to check progress and ensure things kept moving!)

All that remains for me to say is thank you to Rachel for releasing the funds. In the future, I hope to get all of the different organisations that own land around the Rec together to form a working group to collectively buy in services to ensure our park areas are maintained and upgraded easily and cheaply.