UKH

At the moment in Scotland I can drive any distance to visit a garden centre.

There I will interact with hundreds of people some of whom might not be very  careful.

I however cannot drive more than 5 miles to walk along a forestry track where I would meet nobody at all.

 Any Covid 19 risk assessment  would find the forestry walk much safer; then why  are we banned for doing the safe option

Is the 5 mile guidance in place to prevent Scotland being overrun by the hordes of English who would, given the chance, come as tourists but probably not to shop in a garden centre?

Presumably because letting people travel further for leisure will inevitably mean some people descending on obvious honeypots in large numbers, as we've seen in England.

I'd rather see them allow sensible travel whilst cracking down specifically on the stupidity, but I guess that's not necessarily easy. Travel limits are certainly easier to define and enforce.

I guess that they are worried that things like this may happen if travel restrictions are lifted....https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-dorset-52890608

Becasue garden centres are distributed throughout the country pretty well matching population distribution and local demand.  So although you can drive a long way to go to one, very few people will. This means there is very little benefit to restricting it. The cost-benefit calculation is not in favour.

Nice walking areas are not distributed like that, and before the coronavirus people routinely travelled longer distances, and gathered in larger numbers at popular sites. This is undesirable from the point of view of creating new clusters in areas which were otherwise pretty OK. It's also not great in terms of the risk to the people who need to pick up litter, clean public toilets etc. after the masses have been and gone. So we want to restrict that a bit, the cost benefit calculation is in favour, even if there is some collateral damage.

We could have a "no honeypotting" rule.  Or we could ask everyone to do a written risk assessment before heading out and trust them not to let their desire to get out cloud their judgement. But frankly I very much doubt that would work. So we get the 5-mile guideline. I'm not sure I agree with it, but I can see a scientific case for it.