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The society has been pressing Wiltshire Council to secure the removal of obstructions on byways in Wiltshire. The council has finally acted—but only in one case, ordering a farmer to remove a set of illegal gates across a byway in the Wylye Valley. That followed a statutory notice from us requiring the council to have the gates removed.
Before and after: these illegal gates were removed by the farmer across a byway in the Wylye Valley. Photos: Open Spaces Society
We have also urged Wiltshire Council to stop the same farmer repeatedly and unlawfully ploughing and cropping that byway and another nearby . We have written to the council many times, with years of pictorial evidence of these ploughing and cropping obstructions, but it has not replied. Nor has it taken any effective action. So, despite the removal of the gates, the two byways continue to be blocked to entitled users and remain under crops in defiance of the law.
Despite the removal of one set of obstructions, two local byways continue to be unlawfully blocked. Photos: The Open Spaces Society
Wiltshire currently has an epidemic of byway blockages. This year alone we have notified the council of well over 30 obstructions on byways in seven parishes. We have proposed a timetable for them to be removed. Our first deadline for obstruction removals is in early September. We could simply issue a series of statutory notifications all at once, requiring the Council to act, but we are trying to be helpful.
Wiltshire Council has a legal duty to protect and assert the rights of the public to use these rights of way, yet it does not act on its own initiative. At one point it even told us it was considering authorising new structures on a byway to meet the security needs of the landowner, explicitly contrary to the law and its own public policy that ‘no new structures are allowed on …byways…’.
The society urges it to do better, and we shall play our part in holding it to account.