Friends Of The Cliff Walk’s Tender Thunder

The Cliff Walk by Debra Talbert flickr

atest press release from Friends Of The Cliff Walk, issued on Sunday, December 22nd 2024…

Friends of the Cliff Walk, a voluntary campaigning group in Greystones and Bray, notes with interest that Wicklow County Council is tendering for an engineering assessment of the public right of way, linear coastal path, known as the Bray Head Cliff Walk, which the Council itself closed almost four years ago.

This tendering process has come about only because of the work of our volunteers who have been clearing and restoring the path, starting from the Greystones side, since the first week of September 2024. The path has now been cleared between Greystones and the start of the Head proper and we intend to continue our work, with a target date of St Patrick’s Day for the path to be reopened, with the help of a temporary bypass at the point where boulder clay slippage has occurred, while a longer term solution is devised.

The public response to this self-help activism on our part has been uniformly positive as has the support we have received from local businesses. This reaction has prompted local councillors to sit up and take notice, and candidates at the recent general election all expressed support for the reopening of the Cliff Walk.

That support included the Taoiseach and local TD Simon Harris committing to setting up a Task Force to examine the reopening of the walk, and to funding necessary works. We are grateful for this intervention and look forward to the Task Force being set up. Health minister Stephen Donnelly also confirmed publicly that funds would be made available from housing minister Daragh O’Brien and would be ring-fenced for the Cliff Walk.

The Cliff Walk has been closed officially since February 2021 – or 1,421 days ago. In the meantime, most of the barriers erected by Wicklow County Council have been bypassed or moved aside by members of the public.

Our activism has been prompted by deep frustration at the lackadaisical approach to the loss of this enormously valuable asset to Bray and Greystones, to north Wicklow and Dublin in general, and to visitors from further afield. In October, we made a presentation to Greystones Municipal District councillors and officials during which we asked a number of pointed questions. To date none has been answered.

Questions such as, On what basis was the Cliff Walk closed in February 2021? Was a safety audit conducted? If so, by whom and is their report available for inspection?

We asked also for the legal basis of the closure, which one official had indicated was to be permanent, thereby extinguishing a public right of way without adhering to due process for so doing.

The eTenders notice now seeking submissions from consultant engineers seek an ‘inspection and report’ on the Cliff Walk that will have ‘assessed the trail in terms of its condition, integrity and what risk factors are present having regard to an average footfall count of c260,000 per year’.

The clear implication is that no assessment or safety audit was carried out prior to the decision, by the Council, to close the Cliff Walk, or indeed since then to validate keeping it closed.

This is an appalling state of affairs. That a local authority would act in this way, with apparent impunity and without any evident concern for local interests, be they commercial or relating to community health and well-being, and enjoyment of the outdoors, is a poor reflection on the quality of service offered by the Council. In our view, the public is entitled to expect a lot better.

Wicklow County Council has already been offered a solution, interim and longer term, to the boulder clay slippage on the Greystones side of the Cliff Walk. However, Council officials have not engaged with this suggestion in any meaningful way. Instead, after almost four years of inactivity, external experts are being asked, and will be paid, to do what the Council itself failed to do.

You can find out more about The Friends Of The Cliff Walk here, get in touch by email here, check out our recent set visit here, recent developments at this much-loved hike right about here, and its long and winding history here.