SIR - Your article (Craven Herald, July 15) about North Yorkshire County Council’s commitment to spend £120,000 in 2019/20 on repairing unsealed unclassified roads appears, at first sight, to be good news for the walkers, horse riders and cyclists who use these green lanes for recreation, and for the farmers and other land managers who have repaired them for their own access.

However the county council estimates that it will cost £1.85 million to bring all the green lanes which have been damaged by recreational motor vehicle use into “sustainable condition”. This means it will take over 15 years to repair them, at the rate of £120,000 per year. Furthermore this commitment does not take account of the fact that some of these green lanes cannot be repaired to a condition which can sustain continued recreational motor vehicle use. For example, Deadman’s Hill, in the Nidderdale Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty, has been repaired three times since 2000, most recently in 2017 (at a cost to the county council of over £26,000).

Your photo of Kirby Bank Trod shows the damage caused by motorbike ruts to the section of this green lane which is a scheduled ancient monument, a medieval pack horse trod and embankment unique in England. Any repair which would make this section “sustainable” for motor vehicle use would damage the ancient monument. The section of this green lane south of the pack horse trod climbs the scarp slope of the North York Moors and has been so badly damaged that it is very difficult to walk and virtually impossible to ride a horse on it.

Your article quotes the staff time (500 hours i.e. over £17,000) expended by the county council in trying to make a traffic regulation order (TRO) banning recreational motor vehicles on Kirby Bank Trod, a ban which the parish council and local history group have been asking for since at least 2012. Much of this cost is due to legal challenges by the Trail Riders Fellowship (TRF), which represents motorbike users of green lanes. The county council resolved to make a permanent traffic regulation order on Kirby Bank Trod at a meeting last October, following consultations which showed majority support, and again last November – because the TRF claimed it had not been notified of the first meeting. But the county council has not yet actually made the order because of further challenges by the TRF.

In the Yorkshire Dales National Park ten green lanes have been protected from recreational motor vehicle damage and nuisance by TROs made by the National Park Authority (NPA) in 2008 and 2010. The county council should learn from the NPA’s experience and make effective TROs rather than wasting money on repeated repairs.

Diana Mallinson

Old School Close

Settle