Mend Our Mountains 2
The award-winning, headline-grabbing campaign which raised more than £100,000 to repair Britain’s hills and mountains has returned – and is raising its sights ten times higher.
Mend Our Mountains: Make One Million aims to raise £1 million in total for a range of vital path repair projects within Britain’s entire family of 15 National Parks.
The major collaborative appeal coordinated by the BMC and funded by its charity (the BMC Access and Conservation Trust) embraces a sense of collective pride and responsibility for looking after our best-loved landscapes. It goes live today with the launch of a dedicated website: www.mendmountains.thebmc.co.uk.
Bâl Mawr
Monitoring of upland path conditions throughout the Brecon Beacons National Park reveals that the path has deteriorated markedly due to its popularity with walkers heading up from Llanthony Abbey and Bal Bach. The footpaths around the summit of Bâl Mawr are severely eroded and the combined impact of feet and weather is damaging the Site of Special Scientific Interest and protected wet heath habitat.
The park authority would like to halt further erosion, whilst still remaining sympathetic to the surrounding environment. This can be achieved by actually reducing the path’s width, implementing stone pitching on steeper sections, and laying gravel to create a clear footpath. If walkers are encouraged to stick to the marked path, further damage to the bog habitat in which it sits will be decreased or stopped altogether.
The work will be carried out by the National Parks Upland Volunteers and part of the grant will be used to support these volunteers to carry out the work needed to repair the route. This in turn will improve the visitor experience by giving a clear path to follow to access the summit of Bâl Mawr.
The overall cost of the repairs will be high, and the project contains an exciting proposal to help train more volunteers in upland path repair – really valuable skills that are not easy to learn. All this can’t happen without the support of donors from all over – the Brecon Beacons are an incredible landscape and with your support we can help restore a part of it for the future.