This extensive area of tarmac may look like the start of a dual carriageway, but is actually the result of work carried out recently on Woodhouse Moor by Parks and Countryside. The path on the left of the photo has been added to provide a more convenient route for people using the park as a shortcut. Apparently, Parks and Countryside has forgotten that Woodhouse Moor is a park, not a shortcut. Its avenues were laid out in the 1870s not to provide the quickest route from A to B, but to provide pleasant strolls. Why should that carefully worked out layout be destroyed now for the sake of people who just use the park as a convenient short cut. If people are spoiling the grass by cutting across it, then far better to to plant bushes to deter them, or restore the low wire hoop fencing that used to edge all the paths on the Moor.

Parks and Countryside are crazy to be using their limited resources in this way, building unnecessary new paths which spoil the park’s appearance, especially when there are existing paths which need attention, like the badly rutted example pictured below.