Opening up new areas of the farm - a good idea?

I won’t lie - it has always been difficult to deal with people who want to walk on Thriplow Farm. For decades, we have allowed access on all of our tracks, in addition to the public access footpaths. For a time, the government also paid us to open up new areas, as part of the Higher Level Scheme from the early 2000s until the mid 2010s. This changed in 2017 when we went into a new scheme, called Countryside Stewardship. Unfortunately, from HLS to CS, the government’s priorities changed from allowing more public access, to focussing solely on environmental performance, with the end result that we were not allowed to give access onto any wildlife strips.

This caused consternation. Areas that had been accessible for 15 years suddenly stopped being so. Some people called me, or sent an email, to ask why I was being mean. Others just grumbled privately, and I heard about them through the grapevine. In response, I wrote an article detailing what changes had happened, and why. It’s still available, on the Walking page of this site.

COVID has brought things to a head again, slightly, as more and more people want to walk in the countryside. This is a great thing, although it’s highly frustrating when they want to walk on a wildflower strip, instead of sticking to the tracks. Recently, we put up signs to try and make it clear which areas were not for public access. Someone obviously took exception, as within a few weeks many of the signs had been smashed.

None of this is ideal - either for me, or for people who want to walk in our lovely countryside. So, I do have an idea (actually it was someone else’s idea). We could, if there was enough interest, take some areas out of the environmental scheme they are currently in, and repurpose them as Permissive Access Paths. I’ve had a quick look around the farm, and have come up with this potential set of routes - which totals around 10 miles of extra access. Green lines are Public Footpaths, Orange lines are the current Permissive Access routes, blue lines are accessible farm tracks, and the red lines are what I’m thinking we could open up under this new scheme.

There is, or course, a catch. To make this happen we would need to change what we currently do, and get paid for. In addition, I would need to administer the whole thing. This has a cost. What I am proposing is that there is some sort of Thriplow Farm Walking Club. Membership would be £100 per year, for a household. 10% of this would go directly to the Addenbrookes Charitable Trust, the rest would cover the running costs. There is, obviously, a minimum number of households that would need to sign up to make it viable.

So what do you think? Is this something you would be interested in doing? I’ve made polls on the Facebook pages for the villages surrounding, you could either click on them (please only answer one poll), or else email me with any thoughts, david@thriplow-farms.co.uk