DENNIS NISBET, who has died aged 89, was a long-standing Ramblers member and activist and a shrewd, politically-adroit and inspiring campaigner. He became founder-Chairman of Ramblers Essex Area back in 1984, while also a member of Essex County Council: and not many Ramblers volunteers also find themselves as he did on the County Highways and Planning Committees. The ‘hung’ Council resulting from the 1985 election, following 25 years of Conservative stranglehold and neglect of rights of way, enabled him and his Labour and Liberal/SDP colleagues to take on the seemingly impenetrable entanglement of obstructions which in those days disgraced that beautiful corner of East Anglia, and to cause the reinstatement of many an unlawfully ploughed-out prairie-path. Booklets were published; reports were written; expenditure was increased; paths were opened; and locals and Londoners were able to walk with ease to the weatherboarded Essex villages instead of travelling somewhere else first.
As a Rambler Dennis was an indefatigable defender of the rights-of-way network from unsuitable change. A couple of so-called ‘rationalisation’ proposals took up much of his time and energy. He and fellow-volunteers reduced the effect of one at Canewdon. Part of that deal was a permissive path, the use of which the landowner granted, to Dennis’s amusement, “to all members of the public except for Dennis Nisbet”. He was instrumental too in the successful campaign by the Ramblers, the Open Spaces Society and others to defeat the unworkable and unjust proposals by the old county council of Hereford and Worcester to rearrange the path network at Ombersley and in six other parishes.
He was the driving force behind several initiatives in Ramblers Essex Area: the Adopt-a-Path scheme, for example, which resulted in many problems on paths—missing signs, broken stiles—being dealt with expeditiously, often by the Ramblers’ own working party. He was also active in the South East Essex Group, where he held office too. And in later life he and Joy retired to Church Stretton, where he soon became involved with Shropshire Ramblers, promoting rights of way and serving as the Area’s Campaigns Officer until a few months before his death. For many years he was on the Ramblers’ national Executive Committee.
In 2004, Dennis Nisbet became the first private landowner to dedicate land for public access on foot under section 16 of the Countryside and Rights of Way Act 2000. To mark the event the Minister for Rural Affairs (Alun Michael) joined Dennis, local schoolchildren and members of Shropshire Wildlife Trust for a walk on the land: the hillside Lurkenhope Wood, near Knighton, with its spectacular views of the Shropshire hills and beyond. “Dennis’s dedication of his wood both as a nature reserve and for public access is a most generous gesture,” said Shropshire Wildlife Trust. They were right; and it is pleasing to think of that in-perpetuity gift of public access (though he would not have wished it as such for himself) as a lasting memorial to Dennis and his work for walkers.
