LIVERPOOL RAMBLERS
All members should read the important safety notice on the club walks page.
This three-part series contrasts very different views of using the National Parks.
In the Lake District, Mark Weir tries to create a zip wire in the Lake District to give young adventurers an adrenalin boost.
In the Peak District, residents of Great Longstone campaign to keep off-road vehicles and trail bikes off Chertpit Lane, a quiet green lane.
The third episode is about a campaign to enable gold mining at Tyndrum. Those who have walked the West Highland Way will remember this small Scottish town. Will it become a Scottish Klondike?
These are bound to be repeated. If you are interested, then keep a look out for them.
It's nearly ten years since Glyn Williams set up this Liverpool Ramblers web site, to provide a source of information about and for Liverpool Ramblers, and those who may be interested and wish to join us, or to support our aims and objectives. Now Glyn has decided to take it a little easier for a while, so he's passed the web site over to me (Brendan)
Glyn on one of the Tuesday walks, around Mawdsley
There won't be any major change in the site, except that I have shut down the forum temporarily, because of hacking activity and, I'm afraid that those of you who have registered may have to re-register when I reopen it.
You can also keep up with what's happening at Liverpool Ramblers on our facebook page Thanks to John Marnell for setting that up. Or try the Ramblers Association on their facebook page
To celebrate the new arrangement between HF Holidays and Ramblers you can get a sizable discount on HF Holidays. Ramblers Holidays are still operating, so how this will work remains to be seen.
Ramblers has just released their first report on their Mystery Walker project and you can get a copy here. Over 1600 people volunteered to undertake a short survey of about two miles of footpath and report their results to Ramblers. The results show good results for most of the our local authorities and Wirral came joint sixth! Well done there!
Over half the people undertaking the surveys were not members of Ramblers. Over 75% asked to be kept in touch about our campaigns. This shows that there is lots of interest in what we do and plenty of scope to increase membership.
This is the first report, as this is an on-going project. If you would like to give a purpose to a short walk and help others in the process, why not volunteer to become a Mystery Walker. It won't take much of your time, and will contribute to ensuring our footpath network is maintained. You can register your interest here. or download more information on the what you have to do.
The re-opening of Festival park, site of the Liverpool Garden Festival, the first of its kind in this country has been delayed by the collapse of local contractor Mayfield Construction, who were sub-contractor to the developer, Langtree. They have now appointed Tyneside-base Tolent Construction to complete the works. It was hoped that there will only be a short delay, and the park would open in NovemberFuller details here No further information is available.
For many years Ramblers have been working to regain access to this riverside path, and now this is approaching a resolution. It doesn't look like we'll get all the access we think we should, but we certainly would have got less if we hadn't campaigned so hard. This isn't just an issue for those who live on the dark side. You get one of the best views of our Three Graces.
When Ingrid Donakey, Secretary of the Public Rambles Committee of the Merseyside and West Cheshire Area of the Ramblers, was doing a recce for a public walk that she was organising in the Amlwch area, she found that the path was overgrown and obstructed, so she reported it to Andria Massey, the Ynys Mon Footpath Secretary. Andria contacted the council, and a local group of Ramblers known as the Silver Slashers acted on this report to clear the obstruction and improve the paths so that our Liverpool walkers could enjoy their walk.
On the day of the walk , one walker fell at an awkward style, so Ingrid wrote again to Andria, and again work was done to improve the style and make it safer by adding a hand rail.
Thanks to a combination of work by Ramblers Footpath Secretaries, and by Ramblers volunteers clearing the paths, these paths have been improved so that future walkers in Anglesey, whether local walkers or from further afield, like us, can enjoy their walk, and will have a pleasanter and safer experience.
You can find out more about this here on the Ramblers web site . If you want to know more about the Silver Slashers, here it is
A compass has been an indispensable navigational aid since before Columbus sailed the ocean blue, and it's something every leader has in his/her kit on any but the simplest walks. In recent years the role of the compass as a prime navigation aid has been challenged with ever cheaper GPS systems, but could this seemingly inexorable rise of gps be stopped in it's tracks?
Concerns have been raised that new mobile phone technology could overwhelm gps signals and render gps units useless. We hope that gps coordinates possibly becoming unreliable won't have any effect on our campaign for emergency services to use and accept grid references to identify locations.
Read about it in this go4awalk article. This may affect urban gps use more than in country areas , but savvy navigators know that gps can mislead, and don't rely on it for navigation. The compass is still an essential navigation aid.