UKH

A large new car park has been officially opened today, serving the standard Loch Moraig start point on Beinn a' Ghlo. A share of the fees from the 60-place facility will go towards path maintenance on the hill, and elsewhere across the Cairngorms National Park.

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'A share of', 'a proportion of'? Just how much is going to go towards paths repair?

How much is the parking fee? This is a key piece of info and the piece doesn't seem to say what the "modest sum" actually is. And can people pay by cash? I don't have a smartphone (neither do I have one of Dougie Baird's £30k cars).

I've been to Loch Moraig once or twice a year for a long time - am fond of Beinn a' Ghlo, 25+ ascents. This is a big change however - I can see me stopping going or at least opting for the long(er) walk in from somewhere back down the road, assuming they don't do the common thing of now blocking off all the other viable parking places too.

Both are good questions. I've asked them, but I gather there was an actual opening do today so the relevant folk might not be in the office til later.  

Thanks Dan. Answering part of my own question, I've found this:

https://www.outdooraccesstrustforscotland.org.uk/car-parking/

So it's a fiver for cars, but again no indication of whether paying by cash is feasible. Also "This car park is patrolled daily by an attendant" and "There are no toilets". Not sure what the attendant does if they need the loo.

The other issue that rarely seems to get discussed with new payment car parks is whether there's a discount for locals who might go there frequently. I'm in Stirling so it's quite far away, but as someone who often revisits various local hills, and knowing other people of similar mind, I can well imagine there are folk based in Blair Atholl, Pitlochry or even Perth who habitually visit Beinn a' Ghlo from that side 20-30 times a year (eg runners, or older walkers who don't like driving far). Do they now have to pay a fiver each time too?

It says this at the bottom of the page -  "Season tickets for all of our car parks are £15 for 12 months from their issue date. Local residents can get free permits but must prove their residency status."

I'm in Dunkeld, wonder if that makes me a local.

Ta, hadn't seen that. That's good to see although as you suggest it's a question of what counts as "local". You'd hope that Pitlochry would be, and Dunkeld/Birnam surely ought to be too. It's a bit like getting back into the Covid distance/circumference rules again!

Here's what we've found out:

The cost of the car park is £5 for a car, £3 for motorbikes, and £8 for a minibus. There are no toilets.

Any surplus left after operating costs are met will go directly to the path maintenance programme. However OATS cannot yet tell us what this figure will end up being.  

Interesting that a independent charity, rather than a governing/representative body will be making decisions on path building and facilities. Don't get me wrong, I'm all for better carparks (hopefully with toilets!) and improved access, but who gets a say in how path maintenance is carried out and for whom will it benefit?

With my adventure mountainbiking hat on, I'd like to see more focus put on making trails that, while mainly for the benefit of walkers, don't create horrendous water-bar bunny-hop trails that make them totally unrideable. (which I suspect is the intention sometimes...)

It is already the case that decisions about infrastructure are taken by bodies other than representative bodies. In many cases, it is the local estate which undertakes such decisions and deliver facilities, along with bodies such as the John Muir Trust. 

Is there any particular reason why representative bodies should be involved? 

I made an enquiry with the Outdoor Access Trust about a permit for Beinn a'Ghlo and received this disappointing reply -

"I’m afraid the information on the OATS website was incorrect and at the moment it is just the locals near the Fairy Pool car park, Isle of Skye that have been given free permits.

The car park at Beinn a’Ghlo has very recently opened and at the moment payment has been requested by all patrons who use it.

We hopefully can look into the possibility for the such a scheme for Beinn a’Ghlo car park with the key partners,  but until there is one in place, I’m afraid the parking charges apply.

I apologize again for the incorrect information and will make sure the changes are made on the website."

Thanks. Disappointing, as you say.

I was about to say something about the Lakes coming to Scotland, but then I read the word "trailhead" (arrrgh!) and am now confused that we might have been actually infiltrated by Americans.

But seriously, if the charges are reasonable and really are used for maintaining paths to decrease erosion rather than lining anyone's pockets then, sadly, this would seem an inevitable sensible development.

Paying for stuff at the point of use seems to be the current direction of travel. I can't help feeling that, down the line, when everything has a price tag, whole sections of society will be priced out of ever leaving the cardboard box they squat in illegally.

Seems to me that if you want to use something that comes with a cost you should be prepared to pay to contribute to those costs. How you pay, whether by general taxation or for specific use is a matter for debate. General taxation for things like city parks for sure that can be used by a large number of people but I'm not sure that applies to an out of the way car park frequented by a few. By definition you need to be affording to run a car to get there so you are not living in a cardboard box and should be ready to pay towards the cost of your enjoyment.

That is the question, if money actually makes it to the paths. Take Balmoral and Loch Muick, you now pay £5 per day or part thereof, and it also asks for your estimated departure time.  The signage says profits go to path maintenance.  However the new car park ticketing system, machines (computerised & linked back to the vehicle database & system clearly ready to use number plate recognition in future should they want), and the telecom tower that was needed to make the data link, plus some modest additional earth works to increase capacity is rumoured to have cost £500-600k (I have my sources!). That’s Before whatever the vendor charges for yearly system support and other running costs. So 120k visits to pay back the capex.

Note Balmoral doesn’t even provide the toilets; they are run by Aberdeenshire council. The past couple of years they have been regularly out of order, when they are Balmoral Rangers start moaning about inevitable problems and blame the public, rather than either put pressure on the council to fix, or get the factor to say to the council ‘hey look we are agents for one of the richest families in the world’ if you are struggling let us take them on, we have the ability and money to resolve, and it’s in our own interests to do so.

there is also bollocks on the signs lauding the conservation efforts of the estate as PR, yet it’s over grazed by dear, they still do muir burn, they are leagues behind for example Feshie on landscape scale restoration and Charlie and others regularly shoot on neighbouring estates repeatedly implicated in wildlife crime.

Car parks as well as providing potential revenue are also means to control, and means to spread propaganda.

It's not just an either/or, though. I don't regard myself as being hard up, but I'm an example of someone who is in the situation of having a car (well, me plus the better half) but with limits to how far I feel I can take it, costwise. Hence (from a base in Stirling) I've stopped going to Glen Coe or the Cairngorms over the past few years (the Covid restrictions accentuated this, especially given how the Stirling polis were behaving) and have increased the amount I do within an hour or so's drive - Killin etc. Now that the Loch Moraig parking costs a fiver, it's effectively moved further away - eg I could get to Drumochter for the same cost, but I'd prefer to go to the Ghlo hills really.

I could rejig the equation by going out less often but further when I do go, but personally I like being (and perhaps need to be) out pretty regularly, so that's not a great option either. There will be plenty of people making these kind of calculations, both in terms of fuel costs and newly concocted parking charges.

Indeed, finding a sensible balance point between rampant capitalism and bonkers communism is the utopia for which we search.

Being able to afford item A does not necessarily mean you can afford item A plus item B - and as we move forward item A plus item B plus item C plus item D. etc. etc.

Living is becoming very expensive.

Do you really think that 5-8 pounds a day per car is the amount it costs to maintain the car park and paths you walk on that day though, I would think 1 pound more realistic. The traffic wardens likely pay for themselves.

You might want to check the published accounts, there's the CEO £70k salary and matching pension to pay for first... 

Maybe I'm being overly cynical and that amount is commenserate with the task involved... 

https://www.outdooraccesstrustforscotland.org.uk/cms/wp-content/uploads/202...

In the financial year ending 31/3/22 OATS paid out £174,650 in wages across nine staff members, with the CEO receiving £70,552 (more than £3,000 up on the previous year).

Incidentally, there have been considerable path improvements on Beinn a' Ghlo over the past decade or so - the stepped path up Carn Liath and the two branches of the glen path either side of Beinn Bheag. Personally I like and appreciate the glen ones - they've been built to a high standard and give good walking. I can't now remember where the money came from for these although I did once chat about funding with someone on-site. Not sure it was OATS that built them (or even if OATS existed at the time), but the paths have been in for quite a while now without any apparent need for a payment car park to fund them.

Difficult to provide a succinct answer, Dave, but basically most of the past sources of funding for path work have dried up for one reason or another.  When I started in mountain paths nearly 40 years we enjoyed (hard to believe now) funding through first the Countryside Commission for Scotland and then Scottish Natural Heritage at 100%, declining progressively to 85% and 50% - money from central Government (general tax revenue of course) recognising the scale and pace of path damage on our hills.  That perspective, alas, no longer applies: we can all do our bit by pressing our representatives to revisit it. 

Since then, European funding and Lottery funding have been major supporters (as on Beinn a'Ghlo) but have now very largely dried up.  'User pays' in one form or another seems the only practicable way forward at present, whether through car park charges, substantial contributions from the Scottish Mountaineering Trust, or path-dedicated member donations to the NTS or JMT.  Inevitably we may have some quibbles about aspects of how all this is done but OATS, now in partnership with Mountaineering Scotland, is the primary co-ordinator, organiser and manager of mountain path repair in Scotland and does impressive work with a very small team.

On a personal note I regard mountain path repair as essentially about restoring and protecting the quality of mountain landscapes and our experience of the hills.  Skilled hand construction is the key to high-quality work, but it is very demanding (all that skill, all those long walk-ins, all those bottomless bogs and huge boulders, all that filthy weather and midges) and very expensive.  Pressure to keep costs down, or to opt for 'best value' solutions rather than best quality too readily pushes managers towards machine-build approaches where possible, and risks us ending up with banal standardised over-engineered tracks on the hill, rather than sensitive and responsive paths that respect the essential character of the mountain environment.

Us old lags in particular regret and resent paying for the pleasure we've taken for granted for decades, but resistance to paying proportionately reasonable charges can too readily be interpreted by the bean-counting philistines as us actually not caring that much about our mountains.

End of sermon ...  and I can honestly say I'm long past having any pecuniary interest in path management!

Thanks Bob, all interesting. I don't for a moment doubt the whole path-funding thing is difficult and complex, nor that it should be done (although there are a few duff/inappropriate paths around); as mentioned above, I'm a fan of the Beinn a' Ghlo glen paths in particular - ideally the main one would extend further into the upper glen. While I might regret the payment thing, I don't in general terms resent it - it's more that I have doubts about how it's being done, and a charity with a £70K CEO spouting twaddle about most hillwalkers having £30k cars doesn't help with the PR etc side. Neither does them having gone with the person who has probably done more than anyone to monetise Munros over the past 25 years as their recent public face on social media etc. I'm not alone in having given a rather wearied sigh when that happened.

Ideally (not that I'm an idealist), the whole situation could do with a significant and targeted boost in public transport, eg in the case of the Ghlo hills why not run a regular shuttle bus from Blair Atholl to Loch Moraig? This kind of thing can be done - eg there's a minor but very popular version of it just along the road from me at the Wallace Monument - but so little real thought seems to go into rural public transport that I'm not holding my breath. The vast majority of Scottish public transport funding and investment goes into the urban areas, and particularly the big cities - again near me, there's no sensible way to get from Stirling to Lochearnhead or Killin/Crianlarich by bus for a day's hillwalking, which is a bit ridiculous given the money being spent in Glasgow.

There's also the issue which I've mentioned on here before relating to my general (if lessening) interest in the hill list/bagging world: such hobbies are becoming more and more slanted towards folk with money, and the demographic in those terms feels like it's changed quite a bit of late, particularly with the bigger UK-wide lists (Marilyns, Humps, etc) but also to an extent with the Munros. Habits and behaviours change, and that's not necessarily a bad thing, but the axiomatic underlying idea that the hills are for everyone feels like it's being steadily eroded (to use an appropriate word in a path-repair context).

You can get a bus from Stirling to Blair Atholl via Perth. Might not be the quickest journey but it will get you there. It's free if you've a bus pass.

Yes I know that - I have a bus pass and have mainly been using it for Ochils stuff (most recently last Saturday, Alva to Dunblane via the tops). Have been thinking about a Pitlochry/Blair Atholl outing - but that still leaves the road up to Loch Moraig as an issue, and as mentioned the main buses the other way, up to Vorlich/Stuc etc from Stirling, are thin on the ground to put it mildly.

If there was ever a shuttle bus Blair Atholl to Loch Moraig I don't know whether the standard pass would apply on it - but the key thing would be to make it cheaper than the car park, say £2 on the bus as against a fiver for the car journey - as that would encourage folk to use it (plus would provide jobs for a few drivers).

Rather a strange ratio in price relative to numbers.

Car - 4 persons, so £1.25 per person, or if a "pair" as in normal walking/climbing - £2.50/person.

M/Cycle - 2 persons is £1.50 per person, but most M/cycles only have 1 rider so really £3/person.

Minibus - 8, 12 or 16 persons, so £1, £0.67 or £0.50 per person.

Considering Minibuses will undoubtedly only be there by reason of someone making money out of the deal - how come so cheap for them ??

Wow, one member of staff consumes 40% of the wages in a team of nine, and is paid over three years the equivalent of c.50% of the target needing to be raised for An teallach path. Plus is a PR disaster and lacks situational awareness when choosing a public figure head.

Note I don’t begrudge good wages, but it’s clear within the hillgoing community there are numerous retirees whom would be happy and more than capable of doing the role, for less money in order that more meters of path can be fixed…. which is after all the ultimate objective for us at least….   But maybe only one of the objectives for the current CEO.

I think we are back to Roberts point that we are happy to contribute if the money goes to the end objective.

As mentioned earlier while I would like to contribute, I shan’t be doing so under the current arrangements.

The prices seem very over the top considering there's no toilets, but the ratio seems fine to me. It's obviously related to size of vehicle - bigger things need more space so pay more.

Many thanks for your DM and pointing out that there are other avenues to donate towards mountain path work, should patronising the above scheme not be to my liking.

For the benefit of others, links to two bodies conducting path work and in need of funding are provided below.

https://www.johnmuirtrust.org/support-us/appeals/235-wild-ways-appeal#:~:te....

https://www.nts.org.uk/campaigns/footpath-fund

As noted above I am willing to contribute, so I will shortly be making a donation to JMT whom I have supported in the past. I will reiterate that I’m not prepared to contribute to OATS while they engage with Mc****, but if that arrangement ceases I will reconsider.