by MrFlowers » Mon May 03, 2021 10:56 am
I'm fairly new to walking in Scotland and was hoping for some advice on the right to roam. It's probably best to illustrate the difficulty I'm having with a few examples.
I've been for a fair few walks in England, so I'm quite used to just relying on public footpaths. It seems like quite a lot of paths in Scotland aren't on OS maps at all, which I take it is down to the fact you have a right to roam. And that's really exciting in many ways, and makes walks more interesting. I've read through the outdoor access code, but I'm still slightly confused about where you are and aren't allowed to walk. I live in Dundee, and the surrounding countryside is very heavily farmed. The access code mentions that you can walk along the side of a field with crops in, but sometimes the crops are right up the very edge of the field and there's a ditch making walking very difficult. That's example number one.
Example two comes after a walk last weekend just outside of Forfar where I thought I'd be able to go up a hill, but was met with a barbed wire fence and no gate in sight. I ended up having to walk down a fairly busy road instead. This has happened quite a few times now, and it starts to feel like although you have a right to roam, actually exercising that right is very difficult given barbed wire fences, lots of fields with crops in, etc.
I think a fair bit of this is down to my own inexperience with map reading, and I'd love to get better at that. I also think it's partly down to my own fear of making a mistake and being shouted at by an angry farmer. I can see how the right to roam works amazingly in national parks and places that aren't so heavily used for arable farming, but around here it seems like a bit of a battle sometimes.
As one last example, I was planning on doing a variation of a walk in a few weeks. I can't post the link as I am a new user, but googling Finavon Hill Circuit will bring it up on the OS website. The first half of it is down farm tracks and paths which are visible on an OS, but the second half is just across fields with no real discernible paths. It looks like an interesting walk, but I'm concerned about either angering a farmer, or coming up against more barbed wire fences that are difficult to get over.
Any advice would be really appreciated. I really want to get more experienced and get off paths more often, but I don't feel like I currently have the confidence to do so. Is it just a case of getting better at map reading and being bolder in asserting my right to roam? Thanks in advance!