‘THE AIR OF HEAVEN IS THAT WHICH BLOWS BETWEEN A HORSE’S EARS’

The BBA was formed in the 1970s by local riders to address the lack of bridleway routes in an area where there was a pony on almost every allotment, back garden and pen. Amongst its committee were local equestrian luminaries, Norman Bishop, Mary-Jo Pinder and Mary, later Lady Towneley. It wasn’t that there weren’t bridleways, there were, as time and claim were to prove, but due to short sighted and poorly drawn up legislation in Westminster, riders had literally been disenfranchised from their natural environment.

Simple … look no further than the 1949 National Parks & Access to the Countryside Act. Its inept drafting and biased implementation enabled the majority of higher rights to be expunged from the record or downgraded to footpath by landowners & Councils seeking to a) remove/curtail public access & b) minimise the burden of maintenance implicit to higher rights routes, ie. bridleway & above. The need to consult was also removed, unless you were a landowner or Council, and Parish/Town Councils designated as the appropriate bodies to undertake the role of inspecting and quantifying routes. In Haslingdon the Scouts undertook the important task of listing all known public rights of way! Consequently, and unsurprisingly, bearing in mind the difference between a footpath and bridleway was, and remains, indistinguishable to the majority of the public, it is unsurprising the horse was almost entirely expunged from the landscape as routes were simply and more easily classed under the generic term of ‘footpath’. Proof of this calumny has been documented by Sue Hogg, former Chairman of the National Federation of Bridleway Associations, Founder of the South Pennine Packhorse Trails Trust and Rights of Way Researcher without whom the majority of routes both in Cliviger and adjacent Township of Todmorden would still remain unridden.