RESIDENTS are joining forces in a bid to enable them to use a controversially-closed path once again.

The popular path runs from the car park at St John’s Church at Toft to Windmill Wood and Toft Wood.

The permissive path was closed recently because of dogs fouling the path and crops on adjacent farmland, and the closure by the Toft Estate has been backed by the church.

The ‘divisive’ decision to close the path has angered walkers, who are looking to have it registered as a public right of way.

Residents opposed to the closure attended Knutsford Town Council’s meeting on Monday in the hope of winning the council’s backing.

However the council decided not to apply for an order to record a public footpath between Toft Church and Toft Woods after stressing that the land was not within the council’s jurisdiction.

The council also voted against Cllr Peter Coan’s motion that it write to the parish council covering the path land offering the town council’s support and offering to take up the closure issue on behalf of the parish council should it wish it do so.

Cllr Coan said he hoped a compromise could be agreed between the landowner, the farmers and the people who used the path to allow it to be used again by the public, describing the decision to close the path as using a ‘massive sledgehammer to crack such a tiny nut’.

He said: “People contact me in dismay that this path has closed. It has been in use for many years.”

Cllr Andrew Malloy said: “It’s a real shame the small minority spoil it for everyone else. We all walk around country footpaths and see dog bags hanging from the trees.”

Brian Chaplin told the meeting he was representing the South Knutsford Residents Group, which was co-ordinating evidence statements for an application to upgrade ‘the established footpath’ to a public right of way.

He said: “It [the path] is on the tithe maps of 1848 – it was there before the church was opened in 1852. It has clearly been a parishioners’ walkway, and has been extensively used.”

Toft resident Peter Cook told the meeting he and his wife used to use the path, which he agreed had ended up ‘in a disgraceful condition’.

However he criticised the decision to close the path, without consultation, a move he said had excluded more than 100 people who used it regularly.

He said: “This appears to me to be a very divisive, very high-handed way of doing things.

“It does not appear to have been a very public-spirited thing to have done, and the legality of it is suspect.”

The agent for Toft Estate said: “The path has never been a public right of way, and the dog fouling is absolutely disgusting.”

Walkers had trespassed onto farmland alongside the path, she said, fences and signs put up by Toft Estate’s tenant farmers had been damaged and removed, and the church car park, which leads to the path, was for the sole use of the church.

Reverend Nigel Atkinson, the vicar of St John’s, said the church supported the closure decision by Toft Estate because over many years signs put up by the church asking people to respect the church car park had been torn down, defaced or ignored.