Developing the Plan
The Paths for All Partnership produced a Good Practice Guide on the production of core paths plans whereby a staged approach is recommended. The Council adopted this approach as the basis for developing its core paths plan.
Initially the guidance suggests a round of informal consultations to raise awareness of core paths and to find out what the communities actually have and want.
Stirling Council had been running the Community Paths Project before the Act placed a duty on the Council to develop the core paths plan. This project ran between 1998 and 2006. The information that the project provided is a valuable resource on which access issues and paths are important to the communities within the Stirling Council area. The Council used the results of the Community Paths Project as the first consultation stage and the starting point for the development of the Draft Stirling Council Core Paths Plan.
In 2005, the Countryside Service used seven criteria to select 162 miles of path to put forward as proposed core paths from the 2,750 miles of paths suggested during the Community Paths Project. Map books were produced and placed in Council libraries, local offices and auction marts for the public to view. 197 copies were distributed and it was also available on the Council website. In addition, Core Paths Plan News was produced to update people on what was happening. Between July 2006 and August 2007, a ‘Core Paths Plan Roadshow’ consisting of 43 day time and evening meetings was organised and it visited each community council area outside the National Park. Joint meetings were organised for those community councils lying in both authority areas. Comments were received until 30 September 2007.
In total 763 people came to the meetings in 2006 and a further 674 came in 2007. The website received 1267 visits. Overall 734 comments were received from 389 people.
The Paths and Countryside Access Questionnaire ran in conjunction with the second round of consultation. It aimed to find out what type of routes or features are important to people and to find out how people use their paths. A total of 2684 copies were distributed and 1248 were returned resulting in a 46% return rate. 1300 of these were distributed to the Stirling Sounding Board. This is the Council’s citizens’ panel and broadly represents the population in terms of age, gender, household tenure and urban/rural location. 56% of these were returned.
The main views of the public to come out of the survey were that paths should be easy to use, signposted, have information published about them and should be mainly close to where people live. They should provide short circular routes but with opportunities for longer distance routes, they are mostly countryside paths, mostly used for leisure, mainly used for walking, should be maintained but are not necessarily surfaced.
An informal 6 week period of consultation was held during October and November 2007. Plans were produced showing all the comments made by the public during the previous round of consultation and were taken to three consultation meetings. A revised Plan was also produced taking into account the public’s comments. Two of the original seven criteria were used at this stage. The Plans were available to view in Council libraries, local offices, and auction marts, as well as being available on the Council website. A total of 156 people came to the meetings and 66 people made comments.
