Scotsman Archive

The problem of whether the public should be excluded from access to catchment areas in order to prevent pollution of water supplies was referred to by Mr John M Thomson, in his presidential address at the 31st annual meeting of the Scottish branch of the Institution of Water Engineers in Glasgow yesterday. "As a water engineer I appreciate the great importance of preserving a catchment and preventing it from becoming polluted, but as a member of a mountaineering club, I like to feel that our hills and moors are free from restriction and open for recreation and exercise," he said. His sympathies, he said, did not lie with "bulk" recreation, and so long as so much was done for the public and so little left to their own initiative, he was of the opinion that it would prove impossible to teach more than a very small percentage of city dwellers that they must not cover the ground with litter and worse. Even in the more remote popular haunts the trail of the hiker was very definite.

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