Went out to my local summit today the Hoove G/NP-024 and had to leave the summit early on the request of a game keeper, apparently it is now closed to public access, think he was more concerned in case I had a dog with me due to the young birds hatching as he had already thrown of three people today with dogs.
Permission can be granted from the landowner for access, but if I wanted to i could put a twig up by the parking area near the sign, information provided from the game keeper is if you google it all the information you need is there, tried this but only info I found is from north yorkshire police on marking animal hooves in case of theft.
I will try the local tourist office for more information on access.
Thanks
Graeme
Managed to find some info from the natural England website useful website for open access closures http://www.naturalengland.org.uk. Click on acces our legal role then open access land, click on crow access map and search for relevant hill.
2013056770 No Public Access At Land Manager’s discretion 01/07/2013 02/07/2013
2013056770 No Public Access At Land Manager’s discretion 24/06/2013 28/06/2013
2013056770 No Public Access At Land Manager’s discretion 17/06/2013 21/06/2013
2013056770 No Public Access At Land Manager’s discretion 10/06/2013 14/06/2013
I done a search on a few summits Cross Fell was also closed to public access
2013046701 No Public Access At Land Manager’s discretion 10/06/2013 14/06/2013
Sorry to hear about you being asked to leave Hoove G/NP-024. Notices can be issued by landowners in advance barring access at certain times of the year. Dogs can be banned at all times, as they are on the Bolton Abbey estate in the Dales. I hope you got your minimum of four contacts to qualify before departing. I’ve had hassle myself from a gamekeeper of the Gunnerside Estate, and from the gamekeeper on Guisborough Moor, who can be friendly once he has been reassured you are doing no harm to the birds. The gamekeepers put up with us walking across their lands but don’t like it when we stay stationary for any length of time whether activating or stopping to have your lunch etc. I met a nice gamekeeper once when activating Round Hill TW-001 - he actually had a sense of humour! The gamekeeper who minds Swinside is also a good egg, so they ain’t all bad.
Shame that the car park for Hoove is well outside the activation zone for SOTA - you have to be within 25m drop from the summit top and the CP is around 80m down. I expect you knew that.
Slightly at a tangent, I was approach by two Peak National Park wardens when I activated Gun G/SP-013 the other day. But they weren’t for asking me to move on, pack away or anything. They actually wanted to enquire as to the feasibility of hill-going radio amateurs helping them out with keeping an eye out over on The Roaches (HuMP) as there has been a recent spate of thefts of peregrine falcon eggs from there.
I said I would pass on the enquiry, and have already posted something on the Summitsbase website, which admnisters the HuMPs activated programme. I am not sure what frequencies their radios use, just that, like us, they use a mixture of simplex and repeaters (they had no idea what frequencies their radios used - probably around 450MHz?), and I think their idea was for radio comms, which sounds unfeasible to me.
Nonetheless, it made a nice surprise for wardens to be asking for my help rather than asking me to clear off. I say ‘surprise’ rather than ‘unusual’ because I have hardly ever been asked to cease in over 1300 activations, and tend to find people representing organisations in whatever capacity to be genuinely enthusiastic about amateur radio - as these Peak National Park wardens were.