Читать книгу Walking in the Forest of Bowland and Pendle. 40 walks in Lancashire's Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty онлайн

14 страница из 41

The Hodder at Burholme Bridge (Walk 19)

The reality is that while the freedom exists to wander wherever you want, the conditions underfoot often counsel against doing so – footpaths evolved where they did for a reason, and often that reason was to do with the nature of the land. If you want to go ploughing through a bog, and it is on Access Land, then you can do so – but this book doesn’t take you that way.

Dogs

A good deal of the northwestern part of the Forest of Bowland – land used for breeding and rearing grouse – is a dog-exclusion zone. Elsewhere dogs may be banned on land used in connection with lambing, and enclosures of less than 15 hectares, for up to six weeks a year, and from areas important for ground-nesting birds.

Otherwise the new access rights include the right to walk dogs between 1 March and 31 July (and at other times near livestock or nesting birds) as long as they are on a 2-metre lead. Frankly, this lead-length restriction can make walking with a dog rather awkward, and here I write from experience – the dog is often just a bit too close to you for comfort. Not everywhere has such an exclusion, but where a walk falls within a dog-exclusion area, the information at the start of each walk will say so.