I AM sure I speak for many people with disabilities who find this week that they have to pay to use the tailor-made path round Mallards Pike – for some of us at a rate of 35p a minute! – and I urge the Forestry Commission to reconsider the imposition of parking charges for disabled badge-holders.

Like many other disabled visitors to Mallards Pike, I originally regularly went there following a severe stroke on the advice of a NHS physio, reinforced by my GP.

It is regarded as therapy for those with walking difficulties because of the mainly level path around it and the regularly-placed seats. It is an essential location for people like me who need to exercise but cannot manage anything very physically challenging.

It is also a much-used and invaluable facility for those with mental health problems and learning disabilities. To deprive us of it is tantamount to denying prescribed medical treatment.

This particular site was originally planned and designed, as I understand it, with its easy walking route and its seats and its exclusion of cyclists and horse-riders, precisely for people with disabilities and people with pushchairs and toddlers.

The fact that the Forestry Commission has failed to replace missing signs informing cyclists and riders that they are not permitted to use this path suggests that they already have little regards for those vulnerable people for whom the route was designed.

Most people with disabilities who use the path around the lake, unlike leisure visitors or dog walkers, treat it as a regular healthy exercise lasting anything from 10 minutes to an hour, mostly around half-an-hour. But they have to get there by car or minibus and to charge £3.50 for anything from ten minutes' to an hour's parking is obviously outrageous.  

The economic argument makes no sense, since few of the disabled badge-holders are likely to pay for parking in the disabled-designated places at Mallards Pike, so the Forestry Commission will not enjoy any increase in revenue.

Disabled people will be dumped, alone, by the toilets while their carers/drivers go back outside the site to somewhere free to park or will have to negotiate a long walk (often impossibly long) to get to the lakeside path.

I appreciate the Forestry Commission is under economic and political pressure and we might well see this as part of the ongoing creeping commercialisation of our forest, but surely it should not deny a real social function of Mallards Pike Lake as a therapeutic, health-improving resource as well as a beauty spot and picnic site?

I am sure other authorities who take seriously their social responsibilities as custodians of a landscape that is not only beautiful but beneficial health-wise will have come up with alternative solutions that do not increase the difficulties of those people with disabilities.

It may well be an imposed national Forestry Commission policy – but Mallards Pike is not only a special place but a special case and must be treated as such.

– Disabled badge holder, Yorkley.