Proposed Development on Land Adjacent to Jowkin Lane

Email To Bamford Councillors 7/9/22

Further to our conversation at the Bamford Area Forum meeting, on 22nd August, I would like to confirm our position as a local Bridleways group. If the plans show an intention to use Jowkin Lane and/or Furbarn Road as an access road onto or off the planned housing development,  we will be raising objections to that part of the plans.

Public Rights Of Way ( PROWs) have been identified as being safe off road tracks for walkers cyclists, horse riders and horse drivers. These tracks have demonstrated, over the past couple of years, the importance they still hold in modern society as they help people to excercise and stay healthy, especially during Covid. They should NOT be tarmaced as this is dangerous to horses as they are likely to slip and potentially fall. Once a track is tarmaced it becomes a rat run, and motorists assume it is a road and not a track, and drive at higher speeds than is safe. The only traffic allowed on PROWs is traffic accessing any properties on the track, for legitimate reasons eg, they live there, are visiting someone there, or are delivering to those properties.

These tracks then become dangerous to the legal users. These tracks is an extremely popular route for the PROW users in an area which is becoming ever more built up and some tracks have already been lost to housing developments. We realise that part of Furbarn Road is classed as a road and not a bridleway, but as we all know it is very narrow and already potentially dangerous to the vulnerable road users.

We hope that we can all work together to do what we can to protect this important track, for the current and future generations of Norden and Bamford residents, during any considerations of the planning proposals. We would be more than happy to meet with you all if this is deemed helpful.

In addition, the potential for creating additional PROWs around the perimeters of any developments should be seriously considered during the planning process to see if it is possible to create more PROWs, thereby avoiding the need to have to use the already busy roads whose traffic concentration will be dramatically increased due to the development.