All terrain wheelchair access.

I am not a serious hiker, birdwatcher, naturalist and certainly not a keep fit freak, indeed I have always scrupulously avoided any form of gratuitous exercise. I amble across country because it gives me pleasure. I love the coastline, and wandering along beaches, and I love the sense of space walking across Dartmoor, or any of the high wide and open spaces that the British Isles are dotted with.

Most pleasures are better shared, (not all, see my opinion on sharing burgers with Obama) but certainly, the more people I see enjoying the country, the happier I am. Like William Cobbett in Rural Rides, I prefer a landscape with figures. And that means increasing the access.

Access is a thorny subject, the Enclosures Acts, which deprived huge swathes of the population of their rights, and in many case their lives, left only a tiny percentage of the UK open to the citizens of the UK, and those bits were the bits that nobody could be bothered to deprive us of legally. Of course their perceived worthlessness was because they are basically inaccessible.

My work over the last couple of years has been to get the iBex to a stage where most of the bits of the UK we are still allowed on, are accessible to a much wider group. Although it is a wheelchair enabled vehicle, that doesn't mean it can only be driven from a wheelchair, just that anyone can use it to enjoy those bits we are still allowed to enjoy, and that includes wheelchair users. To give you some idea of the sort of terrain the iBex will handle, this slideshow was all taken on one trip, with me staying in the wheelchair throughout.

This is a work in progress, and I have currently stopped to go and drive the iBex somewhere else. More pics will  follow.