Walna Scar Road from the stone shelter near Brown Pike. Photo: Ian Greig CC-BY-SA-2.0

Repairs began this week on a high-level Lakeland walking and cycling route damaged in the 2009 floods.

Work costing £10,000 will be carried out on Walna Scar Road, which runs between Coniston and Seathwaite in the Duddon Valley and which is used extensively by walkers, cyclists and horse riders.

Initial repairs to the tune of £5,000 were carried out on the track after the floods, and now a further 600m-worth of specialist work will be carried out by Lake District National Park Authority staff on the restricted byway, from which motor traffic was banned in January this year again after protracted legal arguments.

The work, scheduled to last 10 weeks, will involve sub-soiling the track to lessen the flow of water down the route. Funding for the improvements has come from the Paths for the Public Project.

National park Paths for the Public development officer Dylan Jackman said: “Over time the track in places has developed into a bowl shape which just funnels the water down its length, stripping path materials and depositing them into Cove Beck.

“The sub-soiling technique, which is used extensively within the Lake District, uses the hard-wearing material beneath the surface to create a hard-wearing path surface.”

A 13-tonne digger will be used on the section west of Cove Bridge to beneath Goat Foot Crags.

More improvement work is planned on Walna Scar Road later this year.

Paths for the Public is a three-year programme funded by the Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, Cumbria County Council and the Rural Development Programme for England, which aims to provide quality and accessibility improvements; adapt the network of paths to improve flood resilience, and develop skills and capacity within small rural businesses across the county.