Reply to Reply (2)

There's no pleasure in starting on this second point in the letter from SWT because it might bring down the combined wrath of the mountain bikers which, when it happens, is likely to be accompanied by a strand of adolescent abuse. So I'll say at the beginning that most mountain bikers I meet are pleasant and stick to suitable bridleways. My complaint is not with them but with the downhill thrill seekers who think they ought to ride bikes everywhere I can walk as if there could possibly be any kind of equivalence between walking and their kind of biking.

Anyway I can't properly respond to the letter without saying this. The reply to my letter to SWT's CEO says:

The failure to deal with this goes back many years and it's not credible that SWT has any interest at all in doing anything about it. In fact it's tacitly accepted and a hair's breadth from active encouragement. There is absolutely no evidence they've tried to stop it.

Having a positive relationship with Ride Sheffield is all very well but what it comes down to is giving them what they want and favouring them over other groups with whom a positive relationship seems less important such as traditional users and Friends of Blacka Moor. In fact it's part of Ride Sheffield's strategy to promote good relations with wildlife trusts specifically to forward their perceived 'right' to go anywhere they want. SWT is going along with their agenda to achieve more MTB access to public footpaths. This kind of love-in can and does spill over into mutually valuable 'you scratch my back' areas. Do we need to spell this out? Might it sound something like this:

Let's all go along to the RAG meeting . And whatever you do don't antagonise the SWT people - like when some of those people complain about what the managers are doing. We want SWT on our side. So either back them up or stay neutral 

This becomes another weapon in the campaign to manage the public voice and claim there's little opposition to what SWT wants to do; especially as most independent minded folk have given up on them in disgust.

Of course it's easy to see that is helped when at least one of the managers is a keen MTBer. Another is a keen horse rider so Blacka's bridleways are now littered with mounting blocks. A woman from the local horse riders group came along to just one RAG meeting and apropos of almost nothing gave a prepared speech that was more like a rant, telling everyone that it was quite disgraceful that some people were opposed to what SWT were doing and as far as she was concerned SWT were wonderful. Having delivered this she said no more and never returned. Perhaps her reward was some new devices for opening gates without getting off the horse.

One blogger with Ride Sheffield illustrates how they go about things. I'm sure he's a decent and sincere person, enthusiastic and  articulate in his advocacy for mountain biking. But however much he dresses up the argument, he's completely unable to shake off the fundamental flaws in it. So all the points he makes are distractions from the essential weakness. This is one of his posts:

http://www.johnhorscroft.co.uk/portfolio/biking/-/rights-of-passage/

The problem as I've said many times with mountain bikers is that they refuse to accept that there can be places where they must leave their vehicles behind and make progress on foot as they were born to do. Their arguments are specious. It amounts to:  'they can take their feet there so we should be allowed to take our bikes there'! Those in the position of landowners should be canny enough to recognise the falseness of their argument. I walk on footpaths not as someone with special privileges but as a human, evolved  to move in that way by default. Away from roads and paths I  leave my bike, my motor bike, my car, white van, quad bike and army tank behind as I do with my pogo stick and every other mechanically aided transport device.

If the biker can get away with it then what's to stop the quad biker? Or motor biker? And he knows that a proportion of the MTBers get a kick out of the annoyance they cause. All aided by his own position, well stated in his blog post, where he admits he rides on paths and wants every path to be ridden on. When people refer to 'studies'as if they are proof that they are right when just opening your eyes occasionally shows the opposite to be the case you know there's no point in debating with them.

And he does refer to 'studies' which, he claims, say that the bikes cause no more erosion than walkers. I've posted about the bridleway on Wimble Holme Hill before and that's now been resurfaced because of mountain bike damage. But another place is on Burbage Moor just outside Lady Canning's Plantation leading up to the Ox Stones. Ten years ago this track was barely one boot wide. It took a bit of finding.

Since then the explosion of mountain biking happened and it's now mostly over a metre wide and in some places has become a quagmire, not just in wet conditions.

You have to have a special kind of mindset to deny that's caused by the bikers who are, of course, riding where they have no right.