Burley in Wharfedale Walkers are Welcome
Annual Report April 2024 – March 2025
Overview
We are celebrating our eleventh year of being an accredited Walkers are Welcome community, and this year we have been as busy as ever, with a new publication – the Burley Tree trail, a number of significant improvements to the footpath network as well as maintaining our regular walking activities.
Thanks are due to our committee members, walk leaders, to our working party volunteers, and to all the walkers on our monthly and summer festival walks for their friendship, company and positive feedback, which makes it all worthwhile!
The Walkers are Welcome committee
Our committee remains reasonably stable, although we were sad to say goodbye earlier in the year to one of our founding members, Simon Archer, who has now moved out of the area. Simon regularly contributed to working parties, led many monthly and festival walks, and introduced longer walks into our monthly programme in 2019 – leading them all for the first few years. He was also our social media person. As owner of the Chevin Trek outdoor shop in Otley, he also generously sponsored our first two Rambles walking leaflets. We will miss him, but will no doubt drink a toast to him in the Hermit at the end of the Festival Night Walk, which he introduced some years ago and which has become a permanent and popular fixture in the festival programme.
Hilary Rhodes has also announced her intention to stand down at this AGM after contributing many years to the committee. As well as regularly back marking our monthly and festival walks, she has been a resourceful and reliable committee member, and we will all miss her – although we will hopefully still see her on walks!
We would welcome new committee members to replace Simon and Hilary. The group has been successful and enterprising thanks to the combined talents and interests of committee members, and we hope we will continue to evolve for the foreseeable future. If anyone would like to join this very sociable and friendly team, please let us know.
Publications
Our four ‘Rambles’ leaflets all continue to sell well. Thanks to Dave Hawkins for keeping in touch with our outlets and supplying them as necessary. Our ‘More Rambles’ (brown) and ‘Yet More Rambles’ (blue) leaflets urgently need revising and updating prior to reprinting, so this has to be a priority for the committee over the next six months.
We published the Burley Tree Trail booklet in August. Thanks are due to Bruce Brown from Wharfedale Naturalists for his help in designing the route and providing most of the text. Also to our committee member Alison Tetley for providing the superb photography. Ann has now supplied 70 copies to Burley Oaks Primary School and 35 to Burley Woodhead Primary School so that they can be used by a whole year group in each school.
We hope to publish our Lower Wharfedale Accessible Walks pack in time for the Summer Festival this year. We have received grants of £500 from Burley Parish Council, Burley in Wharfedale Community Trust, and Shipley Community Chest. So together with funding from Bradford City of Culture, and using donations from the Dales Way Association and one of our walkers, we have £2650 towards the £5k cost. We are waiting to hear currently about two other applications. Seven of the twelve walks in the pack are based on Burley.
Walking activities
Our three, five and eight to ten mile monthly walks continue to prove popular, including with new people arriving in the village wishing to get to know the local footpath network. Word of mouth contacts also bring in people from neighbouring communities. The original format of a 10.00 start from the train station, unless the longer walk is using the minibus and travelling further, seems still to be working, but we always welcome feedback and ideas for improvement. Barbara Hawkins completed her walk leader training recently, so we welcome her to the team of six regular walk leaders. If anyone else would be interested in leading walks on an occasional basis, we would be pleased to hear from them.
In September Ann organised a short walk for most of the team at Grange Park Surgery, and we showed them the new accessible walk to Burley Weir via the Goit. This was well received, and made a valuable contribution to their team building work prior to their extended building being completed.
Burley Summer Festival
We contributed 17 walks to the 2024 Burley Summer Festival, with 360 walkers (331 in 2023). New walks added to our repertoire included Burley Mills and Water Power, Burley’s Brilliant Benches, and Butterflies and Bugs. Two walks had to be cancelled, one because of the untimely and sad death of a walk leader, Muppet, and one because of the breakdown of the minibus due to take us to St. Ives. This year we have 19 walks planned, including the Bradford Faith Trail which will take place two weeks following the Festival.
Footpath improvement work
This was a particularly busy year!
Our major project was the completion of the new accessible footpath between Great Pasture and the Goit, which opened in May 2024. This included a new wide accessible gate at the Great Pasture end. We are grateful to Bradford Countryside Services and to Burley Parish Council’s CIL budget for providing the £13k funding for the project. Also to our volunteers and those from Open Country who did all the initial clearance work. After a few teething problems, the path seems to be working well and gets regular use from wheelchair and mobility scooter users – and many others.
We continue our work to make the footpaths around Burley, on both sides of the river, as stile free as possible, installing a further nine gates over the year. Three of these were installed on Denton Reserve on the footpath between Askwith and Denton by agreement with North Yorkshire Council, incorporating a section of the Welcome Way and the Yorkshire Heritage Way. These were joint working parties with Lower Wharfedale Ramblers, and followed our successful bid for Ramblers funding. A further two working parties on Denton Reserve has so far installed 20 way mark posts on this footpath, with a further 20 to go.
We created a new footpath for the Dales Way Association near to Bolton Bridge on the Bolton Abbey estate, following a request by Colin Speakman, President of the DWA. This included clearing the route, laying 18 tons of hardcore and installing two gates – again done jointly with Lower Wharfedale Ramblers.
A further gate replacing a stile has been installed at Myrtle Lane, Burley Woodhead, on a busy section of the Welcome Way.
A new bridge and gate were installed under the supervision of Bradford Countryside Services on the path leading into Otley Golf Course from Launds House Farm, after the old bridge became dangerous. This now creates the potential for a tramper accessible route between Burley and Otley, providing a short ramp can be created on the Burley side of the bridge and permission can by agreed with Otley Golf Course.
Finally, I’m pleased to report that Tim Johnson, one of our regular volunteers, has now taken over the coordination of future WaW working parties and is busy organising projects through the summer months and beyond, as well as storing all our tools. He has collated a list of additional tools needed, including those that had previously borrowed from working party members, and we have been encouraged to apply for a Parish Council grant to cover their cost.
Walking with Wheels
We had hoped that the surface of the footpath from Burley Weir along the Goit, which can become impassable in winter due to mud, would have been improved by now, following a decision by the Parish Council to fund improvements. However, discussions are ongoing between the Parish Council and West Riding Anglers regarding possible purchase of the property over which the path runs, so the work is currently on hold.
Our proposal that the Burley House field path between the new gate at Langford Lane entrance and the central bridge be made into an accessible route for wheelchairs and mobility scooters using CIL funds was approved by the Parish Council, and this has now been completed.
I’ve mentioned the Accessible Walks pack, but it’s important to put on record our thanks to a number of our mobility scooter and wheelchair users locally who have kindly been testing out the routes for us in advance of publication. It is fair to say that work to improve access around the village and in neighbouring communities that feature in the pack is ongoing – particularly in terms of extending the number of dropped kerbs.
Yorkshire Heritage Way
As the Burley Bridge Association is in the process of winding down, we have agreed to take over responsibility for promoting and selling the Yorkshire Heritage Way guidebooks, and jointly with Lower Wharfedale Ramblers, responsibility for keeping an eye on the route including ensuring waymarking is up to date.
National Walkers are Welcome Get Together October 25 and 26 October 2025
We have been planning jointly with colleagues from Bingley, Baildon and Otley, to host the National WaW meeting in October. Bingley WaW are taking the organisational lead, and the event will be based at Bingley Arts Centre. David Shaftoe from Open Country will be one of the workshop leaders. The event is open to anyone keen to hear about the activities of WaW groups up and down the country, and there will be a selection of walks on offer.
Bradford City of Culture 2025
Under the coordination of colleagues at Baildon Walkers are Welcome, the Bradford Millennium Way route is being walked over the year on every third Saturday through a series of sixteen circular walks. We have responsibility for walks covering the route on Ilkley and Burley Moors in October and November.
Aims for the year ahead:
Leaflets: Update and reprint our second and third walking leaflets ‘Five More Rambles from the Roundhouse’, and ‘Yet More Rambles from the Roundhouse’.
Walking with Wheels: Publish the Lower Wharfedale Accessible Walks pack.
Walks: Continue our monthly walks, promoting them through the village website.
Walk leaders: Continue to recruit and support new walk leaders and back markers.
Burley Summer Festival: Provide 19 walks with some new offers.
Anna Dixon MP Carers Walk 21 September: Provide leader(s) for this Burley to Saltaire walk.
Bradford City of Culture 2025: Provide two guided circular walks along the Millennium Way, 18 October and 8 November.
Walkers are Welcome National Gathering: Finish planning for the annual National Gathering in Bingley on Saturday 25 and Sunday 26 October 2025.
Working parties: Apply for funding from Burley Parish Council to fund additional tools. Work with Friends of the Wharfedale Greenway to apply for CIL funding to improve the surface of the old railway line between Bradford Road and Menston Old Lane. Continue work to improve waymarking between Askwith and Denton on Denton Reserve. Continue to maintain and improve footpaths around Burley, including the annual strim of Stead paths.
Social media: Improve the public profile of Burley WaW using social media, including the management of the WaW Facebook page.
New WaW groups: We welcomed (as of last week) Ilkley Walkers are Welcome as the latest group to become accredited to the national network. We hope to form a positive relationship with what will be our nearest WaW neighbours, who intend organising a walking festival as one of their first projects. A group is also forming in Shipley and may look for accreditation over the next year. We will offer them support if they choose to proceed.
David Asher, Chair. June 2025.
Annual Report April 2024 – March 2025
Overview
We are celebrating our eleventh year of being an accredited Walkers are Welcome community, and this year we have been as busy as ever, with a new publication – the Burley Tree trail, a number of significant improvements to the footpath network as well as maintaining our regular walking activities.
Thanks are due to our committee members, walk leaders, to our working party volunteers, and to all the walkers on our monthly and summer festival walks for their friendship, company and positive feedback, which makes it all worthwhile!
The Walkers are Welcome committee
Our committee remains reasonably stable, although we were sad to say goodbye earlier in the year to one of our founding members, Simon Archer, who has now moved out of the area. Simon regularly contributed to working parties, led many monthly and festival walks, and introduced longer walks into our monthly programme in 2019 – leading them all for the first few years. He was also our social media person. As owner of the Chevin Trek outdoor shop in Otley, he also generously sponsored our first two Rambles walking leaflets. We will miss him, but will no doubt drink a toast to him in the Hermit at the end of the Festival Night Walk, which he introduced some years ago and which has become a permanent and popular fixture in the festival programme.
Hilary Rhodes has also announced her intention to stand down at this AGM after contributing many years to the committee. As well as regularly back marking our monthly and festival walks, she has been a resourceful and reliable committee member, and we will all miss her – although we will hopefully still see her on walks!
We would welcome new committee members to replace Simon and Hilary. The group has been successful and enterprising thanks to the combined talents and interests of committee members, and we hope we will continue to evolve for the foreseeable future. If anyone would like to join this very sociable and friendly team, please let us know.
Publications
Our four ‘Rambles’ leaflets all continue to sell well. Thanks to Dave Hawkins for keeping in touch with our outlets and supplying them as necessary. Our ‘More Rambles’ (brown) and ‘Yet More Rambles’ (blue) leaflets urgently need revising and updating prior to reprinting, so this has to be a priority for the committee over the next six months.
We published the Burley Tree Trail booklet in August. Thanks are due to Bruce Brown from Wharfedale Naturalists for his help in designing the route and providing most of the text. Also to our committee member Alison Tetley for providing the superb photography. Ann has now supplied 70 copies to Burley Oaks Primary School and 35 to Burley Woodhead Primary School so that they can be used by a whole year group in each school.
We hope to publish our Lower Wharfedale Accessible Walks pack in time for the Summer Festival this year. We have received grants of £500 from Burley Parish Council, Burley in Wharfedale Community Trust, and Shipley Community Chest. So together with funding from Bradford City of Culture, and using donations from the Dales Way Association and one of our walkers, we have £2650 towards the £5k cost. We are waiting to hear currently about two other applications. Seven of the twelve walks in the pack are based on Burley.
Walking activities
Our three, five and eight to ten mile monthly walks continue to prove popular, including with new people arriving in the village wishing to get to know the local footpath network. Word of mouth contacts also bring in people from neighbouring communities. The original format of a 10.00 start from the train station, unless the longer walk is using the minibus and travelling further, seems still to be working, but we always welcome feedback and ideas for improvement. Barbara Hawkins completed her walk leader training recently, so we welcome her to the team of six regular walk leaders. If anyone else would be interested in leading walks on an occasional basis, we would be pleased to hear from them.
In September Ann organised a short walk for most of the team at Grange Park Surgery, and we showed them the new accessible walk to Burley Weir via the Goit. This was well received, and made a valuable contribution to their team building work prior to their extended building being completed.
Burley Summer Festival
We contributed 17 walks to the 2024 Burley Summer Festival, with 360 walkers (331 in 2023). New walks added to our repertoire included Burley Mills and Water Power, Burley’s Brilliant Benches, and Butterflies and Bugs. Two walks had to be cancelled, one because of the untimely and sad death of a walk leader, Muppet, and one because of the breakdown of the minibus due to take us to St. Ives. This year we have 19 walks planned, including the Bradford Faith Trail which will take place two weeks following the Festival.
Footpath improvement work
This was a particularly busy year!
Our major project was the completion of the new accessible footpath between Great Pasture and the Goit, which opened in May 2024. This included a new wide accessible gate at the Great Pasture end. We are grateful to Bradford Countryside Services and to Burley Parish Council’s CIL budget for providing the £13k funding for the project. Also to our volunteers and those from Open Country who did all the initial clearance work. After a few teething problems, the path seems to be working well and gets regular use from wheelchair and mobility scooter users – and many others.
We continue our work to make the footpaths around Burley, on both sides of the river, as stile free as possible, installing a further nine gates over the year. Three of these were installed on Denton Reserve on the footpath between Askwith and Denton by agreement with North Yorkshire Council, incorporating a section of the Welcome Way and the Yorkshire Heritage Way. These were joint working parties with Lower Wharfedale Ramblers, and followed our successful bid for Ramblers funding. A further two working parties on Denton Reserve has so far installed 20 way mark posts on this footpath, with a further 20 to go.
We created a new footpath for the Dales Way Association near to Bolton Bridge on the Bolton Abbey estate, following a request by Colin Speakman, President of the DWA. This included clearing the route, laying 18 tons of hardcore and installing two gates – again done jointly with Lower Wharfedale Ramblers.
A further gate replacing a stile has been installed at Myrtle Lane, Burley Woodhead, on a busy section of the Welcome Way.
A new bridge and gate were installed under the supervision of Bradford Countryside Services on the path leading into Otley Golf Course from Launds House Farm, after the old bridge became dangerous. This now creates the potential for a tramper accessible route between Burley and Otley, providing a short ramp can be created on the Burley side of the bridge and permission can by agreed with Otley Golf Course.
Finally, I’m pleased to report that Tim Johnson, one of our regular volunteers, has now taken over the coordination of future WaW working parties and is busy organising projects through the summer months and beyond, as well as storing all our tools. He has collated a list of additional tools needed, including those that had previously borrowed from working party members, and we have been encouraged to apply for a Parish Council grant to cover their cost.
Walking with Wheels
We had hoped that the surface of the footpath from Burley Weir along the Goit, which can become impassable in winter due to mud, would have been improved by now, following a decision by the Parish Council to fund improvements. However, discussions are ongoing between the Parish Council and West Riding Anglers regarding possible purchase of the property over which the path runs, so the work is currently on hold.
Our proposal that the Burley House field path between the new gate at Langford Lane entrance and the central bridge be made into an accessible route for wheelchairs and mobility scooters using CIL funds was approved by the Parish Council, and this has now been completed.
I’ve mentioned the Accessible Walks pack, but it’s important to put on record our thanks to a number of our mobility scooter and wheelchair users locally who have kindly been testing out the routes for us in advance of publication. It is fair to say that work to improve access around the village and in neighbouring communities that feature in the pack is ongoing – particularly in terms of extending the number of dropped kerbs.
Yorkshire Heritage Way
As the Burley Bridge Association is in the process of winding down, we have agreed to take over responsibility for promoting and selling the Yorkshire Heritage Way guidebooks, and jointly with Lower Wharfedale Ramblers, responsibility for keeping an eye on the route including ensuring waymarking is up to date.
National Walkers are Welcome Get Together October 25 and 26 October 2025
We have been planning jointly with colleagues from Bingley, Baildon and Otley, to host the National WaW meeting in October. Bingley WaW are taking the organisational lead, and the event will be based at Bingley Arts Centre. David Shaftoe from Open Country will be one of the workshop leaders. The event is open to anyone keen to hear about the activities of WaW groups up and down the country, and there will be a selection of walks on offer.
Bradford City of Culture 2025
Under the coordination of colleagues at Baildon Walkers are Welcome, the Bradford Millennium Way route is being walked over the year on every third Saturday through a series of sixteen circular walks. We have responsibility for walks covering the route on Ilkley and Burley Moors in October and November.
Aims for the year ahead:
Leaflets: Update and reprint our second and third walking leaflets ‘Five More Rambles from the Roundhouse’, and ‘Yet More Rambles from the Roundhouse’.
Walking with Wheels: Publish the Lower Wharfedale Accessible Walks pack.
Walks: Continue our monthly walks, promoting them through the village website.
Walk leaders: Continue to recruit and support new walk leaders and back markers.
Burley Summer Festival: Provide 19 walks with some new offers.
Anna Dixon MP Carers Walk 21 September: Provide leader(s) for this Burley to Saltaire walk.
Bradford City of Culture 2025: Provide two guided circular walks along the Millennium Way, 18 October and 8 November.
Walkers are Welcome National Gathering: Finish planning for the annual National Gathering in Bingley on Saturday 25 and Sunday 26 October 2025.
Working parties: Apply for funding from Burley Parish Council to fund additional tools. Work with Friends of the Wharfedale Greenway to apply for CIL funding to improve the surface of the old railway line between Bradford Road and Menston Old Lane. Continue work to improve waymarking between Askwith and Denton on Denton Reserve. Continue to maintain and improve footpaths around Burley, including the annual strim of Stead paths.
Social media: Improve the public profile of Burley WaW using social media, including the management of the WaW Facebook page.
New WaW groups: We welcomed (as of last week) Ilkley Walkers are Welcome as the latest group to become accredited to the national network. We hope to form a positive relationship with what will be our nearest WaW neighbours, who intend organising a walking festival as one of their first projects. A group is also forming in Shipley and may look for accreditation over the next year. We will offer them support if they choose to proceed.
David Asher, Chair. June 2025.