Blog
New Management Structure for The Ridgeway
The Ridgeway Trail Partnership: The Friends of the Ridgeway AGM started with an initial open session on the current talks on a new management structure for the National Trails and for The Ridgeway. Chairman Ian Ritchie gave us a short briefing on the...
The Ridgeway Day: 10th May
At 10.00 am on Saturday, 10th May, the Dining Hall at The Court Hill Centre was a hive of activity. Despite the ferocious weather forecast, it was sunny, breezy and bracing outside, but inside there was a hubbub of tables being moved around, chairs stacked, and...
The Ridgeway Trail Partnership
A new structure for management of The Ridgeway National Trail is at last beginning to emerge. It has been decided that The Ridgeway and the Thames Path, currently run by a single committee of all the local authorities concerned, will in future be managed...
Spring on The Ridgeway
Well, what a wash-out of a winter we had to put up with! Almost 18 inches of rainfall over the three months, three times as much as in a “normal” year! It is still boggy underfoot in the woodlands, and so many of the valley bottoms, but at least the...
The Deregulation Bill, 2013
The coalition Government is working up a Deregulation Bill, aimed at reducing bureaucracy, and some sections have been included relating to rights of way, etc, which may provide an opportunity to secure new legislation on the subject. At the initiative of our...
The Great Stones Way
There have been no major developments in resolving the current impasse over the route across the Vale of Pewsey. This remains an emotive issue for some local residents, but neither the local Councillors nor the officials at Wiltshire Council have been able to help...
The Ridgeway Trail Partnership
As noted in our last issue, Natural England has announced that it would like to move to a more devolved organisation for the National Trails, with greater involvement of users and local communities. It seems likely that the current joint management structure for The...
Notes on the Herepath
Herepath is an alternative name for sections of The Ridgeway: it is Anglo-Saxon for Army Road. The greatest military activity near the trail in historic times was indeed at that period - the Romans seem to have preferred their own strategic highways. Later this year,...
A Cockney Clerk’s Enchantment
(An article by Maurice Mendoza, first Chairman of the Friends, reprinted from Aspects of The Ridgeway) I was first enchanted by the Ridgeway over forty years ago. I had just started as a clerk in what was then the Ancient Monuments Secretariat of the Office of...
Coal on The Ridgeway
A colourful Ridgeway anecdote recounts its use for the delivery of coal. The source is Highways and Byways of Berkshire (1919). "There are men living in the Vale of White Horse now who remember the days when coal came from South Wales along the Ridgeway by...