Inspired to get working on some green road conservation, at the back end of 2022 one of the Lincolnshire TRF members (Byron) noticed that two byways near Redmile – in Leicestershire, not Lincolnshire – were on the Council’s winter TRO list and suggested that the group might investigate with a view to carrying out repairs.

Contact was made with the Council and with Dan, the East Midlands TRF Group ROW officer. Both were open to a proposal for repairs to be made. The Council could not afford to do it and the East Midlands Group wasn’t that concerned as the byways in question were on the very edge of its area, little used by its members and appeared to end at a restricted byway.

A preliminary survey of the byways in January 2023 showed them to be in a poor state: big ruts, very wet with boggy areas and one water-filled ‘bomb-hole’. The local farmer had been unable to get his machinery on the byway to cut back the encroaching brambles and the bomb-hole made it dangerous when moving his cattle between fields.

First steps

The Lincolnshire Group members were initially not particularly enthusiastic about the time required and expense of repairing a route that is not even in Lincolnshire and that appeared to be a dead-end for motorised traffic. However, an email exchange with the ROW department of Leicestershire County Council confirmed that, while Church Lane at the north-east end of Byway G9 is technically a restricted byway, it considers this to be a ‘glitch’ from NERC and stated that measures were in the pipeline to correct the situation. No-one would be prosecuted for using a motor vehicle on Church Lane. Once this was cleared up, and since we use the route to link in with our regular rides around the ‘Melton Loop’, the plan got the group’s go-ahead. There was no way that we could cope with repairs to both byways, so an initial proposal, for repairing only the southern Byway G9, was prepared and submitted to the Council.

We were then asked to present our plans at a Local Parish Council meeting! The Parish Council did not exactly welcome the idea. The locals were fed up with night-time ‘raids’ on the byway by mixed groups of 4x4s, quads and a few bikes, many of which came from miles away to tackle the bomb-hole (which usually resulted in lots of shouting, revving of motors and winching at 3.00am). The Parish Council was of the opinion that repairing the route and lifting the TRO would make matters worse. We pointed out that the people causing the issue were ignoring the TRO anyway (as were local dog walkers) and that if the bomb-hole were to be repaired, then the byway would become less challenging and therefore less attractive to the ‘winch appreciation society’.

The Council seemed to accept this argument and mellowed a little. Its members also admitted that they had no power to stop us anyway! The best thing that we got from the meeting was the contact details for the farmer (Andy), who works the land around the byway.

Andy was duly contacted and was prepared to meet us. Although he was initially dubious about the whole thing, the meeting proved very productive. We left with an offer to use his yard as a base for the repair operations (car parking, temporary storage of the pile of aggregate and the plant to load it). His farm has its own access to the byway, which meant that we would not have to drive dumper loads of stone along Church Lane or move it the whole length of the byway from the Long Lane end.