Our friends at Ramblers Scotland have started a new campaign and are asking for help with keeping an eye on Scotland’s upland landscapes.  Working with the Scottish Environment LINK campaign, Ramblers Scotland have asked their members to keep an eye on our hills and monitor any new hill track constructions. 

We, at ScotWays, would like to extend this news to our own members, as many of you I’m sure would also like to help with this monitoring while you’re out and about.

A change in permitted development rights legislation now ensures that all landowners must now notify local authorities in advance of any new hill track construction. In order to ensure this new legislation is working, Ramblers Scotland are keen for people to keep an eye out for any new tracks while out walking in the Scottish hills this summer.

If you come across such a track, please send a photo of the track plus its location and any other information you can gather, to hilltracks@scotlink.org.  This can then be checked to ensure that the planners have been informed of the track, and in that way monitor the effectiveness of the new legislation in advance of the government’s own review in December.

In addition, Ramblers Scotland are putting together a team of ‘trackers’ to monitor local authority weekly planning lists for any new track notifications.  If anyone would like to join the team, please email them directly at scotland@ramblers.org.uk.  This shouldn’t be a lengthy or onerous task, but it’s likely you will be assigned a specific local authority to monitor regularly – and given full instructions! If you’re interested then please see more on the Ramblers Scotland webpage.