Bandit country

The blog takes note of conditions and developments beyond the bounds of Cranfield and one intrepid rambler reports the following baffling obstruction in darkest North Crawley.

I'd never seen one like this before, with a formidable sliding bar lock but also in an apparently locked state with a red-painted  padlock held in an armoured receptacle . How could this be on a public footpath? This is of course, just over the border in Bandit Country. MKC's Rights of Way web pages are not a patch on what we have in CBC. Not even a contact email address could be found nor a reporting form. Instead I contacted the MK branch of the Ramblers who were incredibly helpful & seem to be able to exert pressure on the MKC RoW team under some sort of "special relationship".

To cut a long story short, turns out that this is actually a disabled access gate, would you believe? - the red padlock is a "RADAR" lock for which disabled users can get a common key. This begs the question, how is anyone in a wheelchair or a mobility scooter ever going to get to this location & in any case how would it be safe for them to do so? To get to this spot from the Cranfield direction would have required something with tracks or a 4-wheel drive! When you encounter kissing gates like this, you can be sure that livestock is on the other side & it was in this case, an additional hazard for a potential disabled "rambler". If we had looked more closely (your attention is unduly drawn by the bar lock & red padlock), we would have found that there was a little catch on the other side, which would have released the gate & allowed us to proceed onwards instead of back-tracking!

Eventually MKC RoW admitted that the real reason it was here (and at some other locations in their area), was because it is easier to put one of these mobility-designed gates in locations with a large gap because they are wider & of course fill the gap. That way, they don't have to mess around with adjusting fencing.  They had a job-lot in stock but they aren't cheap - you are looking at a few hundred smackers + installation.  The gate comes with the RADAR lock as standard but there is nothing to inform the uninitiated of it's significance, which they are looking into.

"Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty." Particularly if you want to get to North Crawley before sundown (or closing time)...