Buckle Wood UCR - Potential to lift the TRO
You'll have ridden Buckle Wood if you've ridden a Wyegate. It's TRO'd, (No Vehicles) at the moment, but might get reinstated with your help.
Riders please help us by replying to the Council's consultation with users groups by the 12th April 2023. You can email replies in to Traffic@monmouthshire.gov.uk Quote 'Glynwood Road - Pre Consultation'
References: The Council document - What it's all about. (Opens a Mon CC webpage to show the document page in Eng./Cym. and map.)
You can download the one page document from the link above explaining what this is about. In it you'll see 3 options; 1. revokes the TRO. 2. Remains shut to us. 3. Means a special allowance for the Wyegate to pass! (Surely missing the point. ed.) Make up your own mind - as long as it is 1. Did I need to say that!
TRF have done work on this issue and some of our members are also TRF members, plus we frequently push funds their way when we are in surplus at year end. Our RoW officer Kelvin has given us some tips to include; Say about why you value the road whether as a local or a visitor bringing funds in to the economy. Say about your experience of using the lane regardless of whether you were on a powered vehicle. Remember the countryside is for us all to share but we don't need to moan about how much others have access to. Kelvin says the TRF can handle the technical issues with their legal team. This consultation focuses on our response to those 3 options only and why we want the TRO removed. Talk to our RoW officer Kelvin if you need more info.
The Lane
The road we tend to know as Buckle Wood (because on the old 50k OS maps this was the obvious reference name.) is also know as Gethin's Grove and if you delve further then the council show it as Glynwood Road. On any detail map it should show as the route between Cross Farm in Tintern Cross south and uphill to the hamlet of Fairoak. When I first had a look at the official map and List of Streets at county hall it was at that time ID'd as UCR 53.1 but somehow later changed to C54-3 (OS Grid refs ST 51276 99585 down to SO 50818 00165 - Delete the last 3 number in each sequence if you can't cope with 12 figure refs.).
The Issue
A while back in summer 2020 we were extremely surprised to find that Monmouthshire County Council had erected a No vehicles sign meaning it had been TRO'd. We had completely missed that this was coming up and any opportunity to put in objections or comments on the process. My info is sketchy but it appeared that a notice was published in some far-off newspaper. Whatever, we weren't informed. And it appears it wasn't only us that didn't see the notices. We now discover it was planned pre-December 2019 so it clearly wasn't intended to be a low key delivery under the radar during COVID that was keeping everyone indoors so nobody would see the required posted notices! So Notices should have been posted on the lane for a few months before Dec 2019 and nobody reported seeing them.
Use
The club have members and friends who have used this lane for a very long time, with some of them passing away over the years. It was always a favoured way whenever riders travelled west after climbing up through Limekiln woods at Tintern. I started to use the lane back in 1973 when I first had my L plates (It was too tough on my pushbike, prior to that, though Pant-glas steps was do-able and fun, if a little scary in those non-suspension days.). As a club we started including the lane as part of the route in the Wyegate back in 1983, and it gets used regularly most years. And, of course, gets used by us riders because it always was and remains a beautifully pleasing sunken road to ride with superb woods surrounding it and a fabulous vista opening out of the trees down into the Tintern Cross hamlet at the head of a valley with an amazing industrial history.