June 10, 2024
All in all, our Pathminders squads have spent – and enjoyed – 75 man- (and woman) hours completing this long-overdue, but much-needed project – whose main purpose was to make it much safer and easier for both local and ACP walkers to gain the beach at this point – and thereby avoid the popular but hazardous embankment-top path that turns inland past the houses on Bentfield Point, to face an ever-present risk from wayward golf balls.
Four visits in January 2024 were required to complete this task. A final push on a breezy but mild Thursday afternoon by Jimmy, Ron, Charlie, Howard, Steve, and Campbell, saw over a tonne of rocks, gravel, carried by hand, barrow, and bucket-chain up over the now easily-accessed route across the rock armouring – to level-up and improve the rough path traverse to the top of the embankment and the main path along it to Newton Promenade. Up here, Campbell cut back a further 30m of Rosa Rugosa overgrowth, while as a finishing touch, Ron fixed new direction arrow discs and logo to the black marker post, while back on the beach, Jimmy painted three large white discs on rocks to clearly mark the path access location from the shore.
Historically, we believe that the original rough armoured route was engineered by the local District Council to facilitate beach access through the huge boulders when they were being put in place many years ago – long before the ACP was created in 2008. But naturally, while surveying our ACP route, we spotted this old track as a useful (and probably “safer” route) round Bentfield Point, and did some basic work to improve it. But now, after 16 years of winter storms had taken their toll, and it needed a lot of attention.
