Miles without Stiles and other musings on promoting access on Dartmoor

absolutely Well, I'm actually about to give you the mic back, Amanda, because that was a great segue.

So if we're going to talk about access to Dartmoor, what do we mean when we talk about accessibility? So I'm going to go to you first because you just started to touch on that a bit about the range of things we could be talking about.

So for me, accessibility is the principle that ensures that everyone, regardless of their ability, can comfortably get out and interact with something.

And in our case, that something is Dartmoor.

And as I said, we tend to think of it in terms of disabilities.

but but it's much much bigger than that so it might just be changing from spending a weekend staring at a screen to just coming up getting up here to sitting outside and looking at the view or listening to the birds or so it's a really wide print thing but it's a it's a principle that should we should make it as available as we can to everybody yeah

Tim, as our access, is it access projects officer? Yes.

I'm going to get you to add anything else on this question from your kind of authority.

I was about to say authoritative, from the park's view.

Not authoritative at

all.

So yes, the title is too big to put on a badge, really.

But I think fundamentally, picking up what Amanda just said, accessibility is, as far as I look at it, it's fundamentally for all.

It's access for all.

And that's the sort of term we use generally for this sort of work and this activity that we're involved in, access for all.

And it means that.

And that's paramount.

And the National Park wants everybody from whatever walk of life to be able to, and whatever limited mobility they might have, to be able to, as far as we can possibly provide that, have access to green space and nature.

And this isn't just Dartmoor that does this.

A lot of other national parks do it, obviously, and other national landscapes they're called now.

So within the Protected Landscapes family, we're trying our best to make access as easy and as accessible and inclusive as we possibly can.

Now, you imagine the terrain of Dartmoor, it's quite up and downy, it's quite rocky.

And so we tend to try and pick routes that are either around reservoirs, for example, or valleys or ridges, so that it gives people some fairly flattish terrain.

route to be able to follow.

And if we can't provide a circular route for that accessibility provision, then at least a linear route that has something at the end of it, like that's a really lovely view, an accessible picnic table that the whole family can then sit around, or an interpretation board with a bit of information.