The Covid crisis hit us just as SWOAPG membership fees were due in March 2020 and, not surprisingly, many of our Members found themselves unable to commit to paying their subscriptions at that time. As restrictions began to ease last summer, several of those Members – particularly those who could use the gorges – were able to pay their outstanding fees; but, quite understandably, others were not. The SWOAPG Directors took the decision when the crisis first hit that we would keep all our existing Members ‘on our books’ for the entire year in the hope that most Members would be in a position to re-join fully in April 2021.

We are extremely grateful for those of you that were able to pay your fees in 2020: they enabled us to keep going with our essential services:- keeping you informed about key issues affecting you (including Covid restrictions and funding support); maintaining local access arrangements; and representing your interests across a range of regional and national issues (including post-Covid recovery and access reform).

However, we cannot keep going indefinitely at our current pace without more paying Members and we therefore look forward to most of you renewing your SWOAPG Membership in due course for the 2021 season! We will be sending out renewal notices in March (£79 for Full Members; £27 for Associate Members) when we expect also to have a revised (online) process for gorge users to access Code of Conduct training and confirm their continued commitment to the gorge-walking Concordat.

In the meantime, we should also be extremely grateful to any of our Members who are able to pay their outstanding fees for 2020. We do understand that some of you genuinely aren’t in a position to pay; and we sincerely don’t mean to hassle any of you – but just in case some of you simply overlooked previous payment requests, we will shortly be sending out ‘gentle reminders’ of outstanding fees. If you are able to pay, we’d really appreciate it – but if you aren’t, please ignore the reminder safe in the knowledge that there’ll be no hard feelings from our end!

Thank you all for your continued support – and let’s hope things start to look up soon…