Barrier free access to the outdoors
Rachel Parry from the Recreation, Health, Wellbeing and Education team talks about how we have made it easier for visitors to find barrier free trails in our woodlands and National Nature Reserves.
A rich diversity of opportunities to enjoy nature
Our barrier free, wheelchair friendly trails allow everyone the opportunity to experience waterfalls, mountain valleys, woodlands, coastline, sand dunes and moorland.
Some of our sites also have accessible visitor centres and several have accessible play areas. Garwnant, one of our visitor centres in south Wales, is featured in the newly published Rough Guide to Accessible Britain.
However, inclusive access is not only about removing barriers on the ground; it is also about ease of access to information on where you can enjoy the outdoors.
Despite having plenty of accessible places we had no easily accessible information about where they were! People had to check the web page about each of our woodlands and National Nature Reserves to find out if it had trails and facilities that met their needs.
New one stop shop web page about places to visit for all abilities
The equality impact assessments recently carried out at some of our sites recommended that we improve how we communicate with visitors.
To help do so, we have published a new “Places to visit for all abilities” web page. It has a summary of the accessible facilities that we offer across Wales with links to the individual web pages about each woodland or National Nature Reserve. This new page lets people quickly see what is available and then click through for detailed information about the trails and visitor facilities at each place.
Now we can be both proud of how many sites and trails we offer that are accessible to everyone and happy that we provide much better information for people to plan their visit.
Our work to improve access for all
The new web page is just one aspect of the work we are doing to make our sites more accessible, inclusive and welcoming so that everyone can enjoy the outdoors.
Find out more about our work to improve access for all:
- See a summary of our work on our Improving Access for All web page
- Go to By all reasonable means, a toolkit about equality of access to the countryside and open spaces produced by the Sensory Trust in collaboration with, and on behalf of, Natural Resources
- Our new “Places to visit for all abilities” web page is an example of how we are implementing a recommendation of the equality impact assessments carried out at some of our sites. Read the executive summary of the Equality and Diversity Assessment report