Mind the gaps – the challenge of being a trailblazer

All he sees of it, most days, is the photograph of Robin Hood's Bay he uses as desktop wallpaper on his PC, but his work will benefit the future generations of walkers who will follow a new continuous footpath along 100 miles of the Yorkshire coast.

The Marine and Coastal Access Act, which became law last November, set in motion the creation of a continuous right of way around England's entire 2,700 miles of coastline.

The first specially created footpath under the new Act will be a 12-mile stretch near Weymouth in Dorset, to be completed by 2012 in time for Olympic sailing events at the resort.

However, the whole route is expected to take a decade to complete at a cost of 5m per year. An audit by Natural England, the government's outdoors agency, revealed that only 66 per cent of the shoreline had a legally-secure footpath, which means that about 900 miles of new rights of way will have to be created. Of the 100 or so miles of Yorkshire coast, just over half are already established rights of way.

As one of Natural England's lead advisers on Coastal Access, Andrew Best has been preparing for the new stretches of Yorkshire coast footpath which, he says could be open to walkers by 2014.

Specially created new rights of way will be required along the 35 miles of cliffs between Bridlington and Spurn. Currently, the East Riding's Holderness shoreline has only intermittent public access and one of its unwalkable stretches extends for more than 12 continuous miles.

Other new rights of way will need to be negotiated south of Filey. An initial survey by Natural England found 18 gaps which need to be plugged in order to create a continuous footpath from the resort to Flamborough Head.

One of the gaps is at the former Butlins Holiday Camp, which is fenced off.

There may also be amendments to coastal footpaths that already exist between Filey and Teesside.

Andrew said: "Although there is an existing footpath, the Cleveland Way, we won't slavishly be saying that should be the line the new trail will take."

Work on the Yorkshire path is scheduled to start next April, when the line the route will take is identified in East Yorkshire and a consultation process with farmers, landowners and the Ramblers Association begins. Work on the route between Teesside and Flamborough Head will not begin until 2015.

For much of its course – not just in Yorkshire but elsewhere in England – the footpath's width will be four metres, or about 13 feet, but it may be less near buildings or where existing footpaths are narrower. Safety will be the main consideration.

However, the Act allows for not just for a footpath but also for what has been termed "spreading room". This will provide a kind of coastal right-to-roam, giving people the opportunity to picnic away from the path and to take a look at places of special interest on the shore.

"Basically, anything between the line of the path and the sea will become spreading room," Andrew says, "but there will be lots of exceptions. Obviously, military land and ports will be exempt, as well as houses and gardens. And there might be nature conservation reasons why it wouldn't be appropriate to allow spreading room on the seaward side. We will have to be sensitive to all sorts

of needs."

To a lesser extent the spreading room concept will be applied to the landward side, but only to allow walkers to access places of special interest. There will be problems in applying this concept on the Holderness coast because of several large caravan parks which extend along the cliffs, and two major North Sea gas installations.

Another important feature of the new path is a concept called "roll back", which might well be used in Yorkshire more than any other part of England.

Roll back is designed to keep a right of way even when coastal erosion washes the original footpath into the sea.

Where the path disappears in this way the right of way will "roll back" on the land. In England, an estimated 13 per cent of existing coastal paths will crumble in the next

two decades.

But the worst erosion in Europe is on the Holderness coast of East Yorkshire. In some places it is eroding at a rate of more than six feet a year, and so the line of footpath there is expected

to be frequently "rolled back".

Further north, sections of the Cleveland Way between Filey and Saltburn have disappeared in recent years and between 10 and 15 miles of footpath are thought to be at risk in the future.

Malcolm Hodgson, national trails officer for the North York Moors National Park, looks after the Cleveland Way and short Yorkshire Wolds Way stretches of footpath on the coast.

He says: "Some of the land over which the Cleveland Way is currently routed will have fallen into the sea by the time work starts there on the coastal access footpath.

"So the key thing for us will be this automatic rolling back of the path. It's something we don't have at the moment."

Between Filey and Scarborough there are several sections of footpath where fence posts which once marked the clifftop now lie dangling over

the edge.

The tidal action of the sea on boulder clay eats away the bottom of the

cliff, creating a gravitational pull on everything above it.

This pull is made irresistible by water drainage after heavy rainfall, which seeps through the clay to cause landslips.

It is hoped the entire Yorkshire stretch of the new coastal path will be completed by 2019.

Then there is bound to be a race to become the first person to walk the

new route.