Reading the front page of the Press regarding the ban on the mountain bikers using the cliff path for riding selective events. I would like to add a slightly different slant to this debate, because it must be a debate and not a 'fait accompli'.
If you can cast your mind back to the year of the Great Fire of Creux Mahie. I bet most of the members of E&I were still at school then. At that time I was an active member of the GMCCC riding motorcycle trials. The year before the fire, we (club members) had spent a lot of time cutting pathways through the whole of the Cruex Mahie area from the pumping station through to the Le Prevote area. The whole of this area was completely overgrown with gorse, bramble and fern.
But before we could cut these paths we needed the permission of the land owners. Now a very keen and enthusiastic, NO, more-than-enthusiastic, stalwart of the GMCCC had spent hours researching in the Greffe to find the land owners, of which there are many. Permission was obtained from many landowners and it was found that in a lot of cases the land continued over the cliff edge. Nevertheless we cut our paths and gained access to the whole area. A point here is to mention that some of the landowners did not know they owned the land.
Then the fire occurred and the whole area was destroyed and all the work we had carried out was destroyed as well, but the fire had exposed all the old and ancient field boundaries and rubbish tips, cress beds daffodil fields, in fact it was like a history lesson to see all this exposed. At one time all this land was producing a harvest of sorts.
Now to the point of this letter. As you all know the old and ancient cliff paths did not run along the whole of the south coast. There was no need. Why walk when you could catch the bus! There were certain areas where they did not run and included in this was the area where the fire had devastated the cliff top. The fire had also exposed the pathways we had spent hours cutting so people naturally started to walk them. Then the Environment & Infrastructure Committee or the equivalent in those days wrote to the GMCCC and asked the club to stop riding motorcycles on the cliff paths. Our paths, paths we had cut. Paths that had not existed before. (We cut new ones alongside the 'public' ones.)
Public works at the time were using unemployed people, 'relief workers', to carry out public-space projects and they were given the task to complete the joining up of the paths. Some of these paths run on private land.
These paths are used for all sorts of public events like running, charity events, dog and leisure walking, so why not let the mountain bike enthusiasts use them on selected days?
It would be interesting to know just how much information, legal or otherwise, that E&I has on the entirety of the path and whether it has permission to allow the public to use it.
We are a small island and we all need to share our space with others and we should all be pleased that other people are enjoying our space doing what we like to do. What has happened to Guernsey Together?