This is a personal response which is informed by both the second consultation report and the massive public response.  As a member of the Freedom to Choose - Snowdonia group I undertook the analysis of the questionnaires, and currently house them (about 4,700!).  The freely made comment is therefore known to me and I have no choice but to claim an informed opinion.  These responses are available for inspection to any one on request and must serve as an integral part of any further deliberations.  Some statistics appear at the end of this letter.

The intention is to support the principles of the National Parks Act, not to undertake an argument.  It is now consolidated that we pre-empted public opinion, although we appreciate that popular concepts are not necessarily a healthy premise for policy.

A second consultation report has, in detail and in spirit, systematically dissolved the fallacious claims of the first; this has taken us back to where we started at great cost.  The scheme has done immeasurable damage to an authority we would wish to support.  There is no joy for anyone in this.

My central concern is that this awesome, magnificent landscape, a utopian place of aesthetic sublimity, receives no such passionate definition in the report and is reduced to ‘an area of high landscape value’ a mere commodity.  This lack of a need to establish the spiritual value of place disengages the absolute necessity of respect which must underlie all initiatives.  Such a respect, contained in the first principle of the National Parks Act, protects the place and thereby those appropriate sentiments that elevate the human spirit; a probity beyond question.  The sentiment is echoed repeatedly in public comment.  This intangible quality actually precedes the physical entity, beauty in the eye of the beholder.  The consequent recognition fortuitously establishes the greatest potential for financial benefit.  The public will pay for this experience, their sense of freedom and access and the hospitality that is integral to this opportunity.  On such a premise, tourism is always an engagement of respect, not of possession, and one that more easily recognises the culture of their hosts.  The initiative that ignores this principle will ultimately contribute to the killing of the golden goose.

The transport aspect of the Green Key Scheme sought to impose a foreign control, and to condition the sense of choice, organise our expenditure, urbanise our engagement, theme-park our experience and thus impede the random encounter that contributes to the sense of freedom integral to this elemental landscape.  The second consultation report goes some way to contradict these ideas.  I presume the reader of this letter knows its content.

Fixations have dogged the public transport and parking debates.  These should be re-visited in the light of profit to the local community, not of profit to ‘systems’.  Public transport is an obligation of any caring society but it does not mean ‘bus’.  The numbers likely to use such a system are itemised as small, and bearing in mind the catastrophic up-take at present, it is reasonable to suggest a mini-bus service.  This adequacy comes within the scope of private ownership, able to establish a regular timetable, plus an immediate response service; outlay and subsidy would be smaller and the entrepreneurial spirit encouraged in the report would guarantee both employment and profit to local people.  To suggest throwing a whole new bus fleet at the random travelling of a free-spirited tourist in a weather variable National Park is to be laughed out of court.  The bus in rural areas is a polluting dinosaur.

The overflow parking solution should, with all the guarantees of screening, be offered to farmers; such a contribution would open up new areas and merit a fee, keeping profit in the community.  It should be stated, however, that elsewhere parking fees merely rob local income and deter visitors.  (Often quoted in the questionnaires).

 The suggestion that the ‘clearway’ concept is retained makes several serious mistakes.

1. it presumes the present honey-pot areas are sought by choice.  This is only partly true.  Access is denied to many areas that would share the load, but for lack of parking.  There are stretches of road, four or five miles long within the heart of Northern Snowdonia where stopping is impossible, let alone parking.  This puts a great many footpaths and vistas out of likely use.  Screened stopping places can sensitively be introduced as a solution, not repeatedly measured as a problem.  Their requirement is the symptom of a success story.

2. ‘clearways’ are an urban concept, out of keeping with a National Park.  Such concepts have a habit of growing far beyond the control of the first initiators.

3. the consultants have measured only one-twelfth of the year as prone to crowds.  Even then, this is a low, relative, subjective observation.  The ‘clearways’ concept is an extraordinary presumption that the National Park has been given over as the property of tourism, its restrictions for eleven-twelfths of the year inconveniencing a dis-inherited local population.  This is unforgivable.

With considerable clarity, the reasonings and statistics conspire persistently to re-invent the car.  The denial may be a useless contortion.  The optimum ‘economic’, ‘time efficient’, ‘flexible’ and ‘integrated’ are all satisfied.  ‘Modal shift’ is cuckoo land.  Also, the advantage of the car is its disappearance act.  The structures and signage that would regulate it are permanent in their visible trespass.

 Gateways can gain by re-assessing their interpretative role in a National Park, which some ignore; but large visitor car parks undermine the integrity of their cultural identity and architectural scale.  Such notions are part of the insensitivity that punctuates this scheme.

The clumsy, persistent carping about visitors who spend little or nothing discloses a short sightedness and a slightly distasteful sentiment that has coloured the reports in a pick-pocketing way.  It must surely be obvious that in keeping with this liberating holiday experience the decision to spend should be a voluntary one inspired by the quality of goods and services.  These young visitors who today rush in and away, their freedom respected, are tomorrows ‘loyalty’ spenders referred to in the report as a major fraction of the success story.  The implication that we are all clients to be snared into optimum spend is a function outside the more important and sensitive concerns to promote the ethos of the National Parks.  I believe this sentiment underlies the public objections.  The consultants, given a limited brief, have failed to deliver real vision.

Finally, I address a concern that does need our immediate attention - the destruction or serious compromise of Welsh vernacular architecture both in the park and beyond.  The Yorkshire Dales and the Lake District recognise architectural heritage as second only to landscape, a major attraction for the economy.  Here in Wales we destroy the very thing that expresses the most tangible and visible aspect of culture.  ‘Welshness and cultural identity’ are itemised in the report as seriously invisible.  Architecture here is relegated by disparate personal whim, with no care for heritage, idiosyncrasy, good design or environmental integrity.  The Park Authority in its lack of compulsion to seek the necessary controls effectively gives licence to this destruction which is nothing short of cultural vandalism.  It is only a matter of time and the compromise will be complete.  Architecture is not a passive option. 

We may have to look no further than architecture to explain the success of Beddgelert and the poverty of Bethesda.  Yet the latter sits within 5 miles of eleven three thousand foot peaks and ten natural lakes.  Whilst it never boasted exceptional buildings, its simple honest character has been finally eradicated by a European grant selling its heritage for an ignorant ‘posh’ of pebbledash.  It is worrying that money can destroy so quickly; or is it careless ignorance?  Here is a cause that desperately needs action.

There is a conspicuous self-satisfying conclusion with management schemes - to promote management itself.  This is not in sympathy with much of the public comment.  It is the liberating engagement that underpins visitor experience and therefore the economic possibilities.

The recommendations to promote welcome and interpretation are very sound and rightly identify an ambivalence towards tourism; but to resurrect the scattered remains of the scheme is no scheme at all.  The public have sensed the lack of inspired vision and have voted with a massive reassuring response.  It is heartening to know that the guardianship of the Park ethos is so extensive.  We can, I believe, presume that a more principled scheme, and one born out of a love of place and spirit of place, would gain by this discerning contingent.

          Reminder: questionnaires available for scrutiny at 
Ffrancon House, Tyn-y-Maes,  Nant Ffrancon, 
Bethesda, Gwynedd LL57 3LX

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