Cambria Politico - The Political Blog

Expect all sorts of chaos next month if Jane Davidson follows her own nose over the Welsh coastal path which the Assembly government is so keen to fund and create.

The environment minister is due to issue a consultation paper, probably around the middle of next month, on what form the path should take.

Wales has a lot of experience of coastal paths - chiefly via one of Britain’s first, the Pembrokeshire one, offspring of that early national park.

Next week sees a massive extension of that path, with Ceredigion county council officially opening an uninterrupted 80 km stretch between the Teifi and Dyfi estuaries. With 20km stretching along previously pathless coast, it has cost £500,000, and taken a decade to create.

Both paths are of the same standard, wide enough for two walkers abreast. And the other 14 counties are already spending Assembly money, channeled through the Countryside Council for Wales, to create the same sort of path around the stretches of coast which are currently lacking.

The councils spent £1.5m on the project last year and £2m this on creating a path with lots of links within two km inland of the coast.

The question now worrying the sector is what will appear in the consultation paper (the public will have 10 weeks to respond). Will it give statutory powers to the councils and CCW to create the path ? This probably would be happily welcomed, to deal with the couple of awkward landowners who always crop up.

Or would the paper try to create a massive swathe along the coast, with any field abutting the land’s edge entirely taken over  by the public, with their children, dogs and accompanying mess ? Note, dogs are banned from the Ceredigion path.

Many of the Welsh consultees anxiously awaiting the consultation paper are English-based countryside organisations, whose Welsh branches’ main raison d’etre is to spread the good-news a la England this side of the dyke.

They want a swathe. So does the minister in her personal capacity - she is the former vice-president of Ramblers’ Association Wales. RA Wales talks of the need for the new stretches of Welsh path to be like the rest - by which they mean, not Pembs and Cards, but England.  After all, they don’t want visiting walkers to be confused…