Another weekend on the moors, valleys and crags bordering Sheffield. Except this one was utterly incredible due to the visitor numbers drawn here by the aurora.
Sunday evening now and as the car parks empty and i sit above one of the valleys with hardly a soul in sight and the calls of the ouzel and the cuckoo for company one sentence, uttered several times over the weekend (and indeed quite regularly throughout the year) resonates, puzzles and concerns me:
‘it doesn’t say i can’t’
We were ‘caught off guard’ by the number of people visiting the area to see the aurora on Friday night. As is often the case we few wardens and rangers on the night shift were focussed on spotting folks walking with the tell-tale carrier bags of food and a disposable barbecue down towards woods and crags. If we can catch them before ‘ignition’ then not only does that remove the fire risk but generally speaking they haven’t had their share of the three 12 packs of lager and the ‘please could you extinguish the barbecue’ conversation isn’t had with one eye on personal safety (we often sit around in ‘watching spots’ and laughingly recount some quite hair-raising ‘near misses’
….. ‘oh remember gazebo gang down there with the lad carrying an axe that tried to creep round the back of us whilst his pissed up mates argued their god given right to have a fire in tibder dry woodland ….. etc etc
I think i’ve got good at being able to spot the potential barbecue carrier from a long way away and i’m ‘pleased’ to say that some i saw and called in this weekend were stopped from lighting them or caught up with shortly after lighting them.
At this juncture in this rambling post i’d like to point out the difference between ‘i’m really sorry i didn’t know’, and ‘it doesn’t say i can’t. I probably heard the former sentence half a dozen times this weekend – most often from overseas students who are usually very apologetic and very helpful.
Which brings me on to the other sentence …. which i’m hearing more and more, mostly passive aggressively.
A barbecue in the vegetation on the roadside under Higger …
‘Hello there, i one of the wardens for this part of the moors and there is a ban on barbecue use and a high fire risk at the moment …. could i ask you please to extinguish your barbecue ….
‘It doesn’t say i can’t
‘There are signs on all the access points to the moors and fire risk here in the countryside is covered on the media a lot’
‘I haven’t passed an access sign and nowhere does it say i can’t
Give it a few weeks and there will probably be ‘no barbecue’ banners at a lot of the ingress points and in periods of very high fire risk there are sometimes mobile traffic signs telling drivers that barbecues are banned.
The same conversation happens in woodland. Firestarters stating that between their car and their barbecue / fire they never passed anything that ‘said they couldn’t’.
It’s quite easy to ‘not see’ something if you choose to i guess.
I’m absolutely against the smothering of the countryside in anything but the absolutely essential notices. I’m also absolutely certain that said barbecuer wouldn’t light a barbecue in the hedge in their own garden, nor would said firestarter light a fire in the nearest clump of trees to their home.
The other place i hear ‘that’ sentence is around parking …
‘Excuse me, parking there is damaging the verge and causing erosion …. is there any chance you could move and park on hard standing please …. ?
‘It doesn’t say i can’t park here’
I don’t recollect persuading anyone otherwise in the last few years. To me roadside verges in the countryside are almost a microcosm of the wider problem. No space in the car park or lay-by so you park outside the lay-by on the grass ….. this is often done by 4x4s to begin with as they can best cope with the slopes …. the ‘someone has parked there before’ scenario kicks in …. the vesgetation dies … the slope is reduced …. often times the road margin and also any fence or wall adjacent are impacted by the erosion – and weather events exacerbate this – and before too long you have a bare mud extension to the car park. An obvious accelerant here is if the car park becomes pay and display and the ‘parking just outside the car park to avoid paying’ speeds it all up. Under Higger you can see very significant road damage where rain waters have been re-routed because the verges and edges have been trashed. This leads to walls collapsing and landslips.
But ‘it doesn’t say i couldn’t park there’ …
It doesn’t say anywhere that you can’t have a nice sit down in the middle of busy A road but you manage not to ….
The aurora this last weekend brought an entirely new demographic to the countryside for one night only …. having mostly missed out on the Friday night, the British public woke on Saturday to some incredible pictures. Saturday afternoon saw a few large picnics and parties for the aurora set up at about 4pm
and by about 6pm (5 hours before the aurora was forecast) they’d packed up and gone home. At 8pm the very limited parking spaces were all full.
At about 9pm they started coming in their droves. The arterial routes in to the National Park were mostly a queue.
At about 10pm i counted almost 300 cars in 15 minutes heading past Upper Burbage Bridge.
And then it got properly busy … and i realised that Eurovision had finished and Sheffield emptied in to the moors. Thousands and thousands of people with mostly no idea where they were, what they were looking for or where to park.
So they parked on the verges. Where nothing impeded them they verge parked from near the Norfolk Arms (on the Ringinglow approach) and the Fox House (on the Hathersage Rd) approach. It went for miles and miles. As far as beyond Rushup Edge towards Chapel-en-le-Frith. They parked on both sides of the road too. It was like a scene from the top of Alp d’Huez on the Tour. Colleagues on the mountain rescue team reported making incredibly slow progress through it all to a shout beyond Edale.
No police were around and we few wardens concentrated on spotting fires and dealing with those. The irony was there was no view hereabouts of the aurora on Saturday night.
My concern is that all those thousands and thousands of new visitors won’t know anything other than ‘parking where you want’ when they next visit.
I struggle to comprehend where ‘this will all end up’ if people think they can do anything they want in the countryside unless there’s a very large unmissable sign right in front of them when they leave their car (and nothing to say they’ll heed the sign anyway).
And i haven’t even mentioned the influence of influencers …
The sky has darkened now and a storm is inbound. A red grouse calls nearby.
It’s been a very very full on week – and i’ve sipped coffee or sat out in the moors with some inspirational people – some old friends and some new acquantances – all of whom are just doing what they can with the resources they have available to them to look after landscapes for nature and for humans alike.
Words and photographs 1,3 and 4 are ©️ me.