First the Old Plough has gone and now the footpath is being moved!

This is all that's left of the Old Plough at Weston: an attractive old pub flattened to make way for a housing estate. That's bad enough but now the footpath is going to be moved from stone wall it used to follow to a pavement through the estate. It looks as if there's not much that can be done now. This is just a further degradation of our Right of Way system.

Ramblers Forums Chopped

The Ramblers have closed their forums with little notice to users or even moderators.
Their reason being that the forums were underused.
Not surprising when there was hardly any publicity spent on them and the software was looking a bit out of date.
I think some notice should have been given and some discussion on the forums encouraged about where to go next.

There were some very high quality discussions there particularly on the corruption of Definitive Map (something relevant around here.)

I have pdf-ed some of the best and placed them here for download.

http://tinyurl.com/ramforumposts

Not as it seems

I have been playing with a new piece of online software called “Where’s the path”. It consists of two views of the same patch of land. One side can be a modern OS map (1:50000 is the most detailed at the moment) the other side can be Google maps or Google Earth or even 1930s OS maps. The beauty of this free (so far) software is that you can follow paths on one side and plot them on the other. This will make a lot more sense once you get your hands on it.

In the example above (click on the image) the yellow/green line is the route as plotted from the OS map; the red line is the actual route on the ground. This is Melbourne FP25 from the Ashby Road (opposite Sir Henry’s Lane) to Park Drive, Breedon. I had always thought that the line was wrong especially in the middle stretch now I can prove it.

I guess this is fairly typical of footpaths elsewhere and not much can be done about it whilst more urgent problems have still to be addressed.

“Where’s the path” can be found here.