Cairngorms National Park Family of Ranger Services welcomes visitors across the Cairngorms National Park ensuring they have a safe and responsible visit to help support Land managers and communities across the Park. 14 ranger services operate in partnership, the Family of Cairngorms Rangers, to promote the Scottish Outdoor Access Code to the two million visitors that come to enjoy this fantastic National Park each year. Through positive engagement and education rangers enable safe access and ensure land management activities can continue ensuring a sustainable future for tourism and traditional industries across our communities whilst safeguarding habitats and species.
Cairngorms National Park welcomes around two million visitors each year, with many of these visits taking place in key honeypots. The past three years has seen an additional pressure on these key visitor hotspots resulting in additional pressures on land managers and communities due to some challenging visitor behaviours and activities. In order to help alleviate these pressures and associated issues, namely around visitors with dogs, camping, fires, litter and waste the Family of Cairngorms Ranger Services work together to promote key visitor messages through face-to-face engagement and education helping to change visitors understanding and behaviours around responsible access. Working together in partnership, establishing relationships and communication channels has enabled a greater ranger presence across the Park, which can be prepared and flexible in its approach to visitor management throughout the visitor season. The promotion of clear consistent messaging has resulted in an enhanced and more positive visitor experience and is helping to alleviate the undesired visitor pressures in these key honeypot areas. This results in the safeguarding and protection of our sensitive habitats and species, enabling land management operations to continue and alleviates pressures on communities and land managers. This joined up approach, working partnership is a more sustainable way of working with the benefits of fourteen rangers services working together being much greater than the sum of its individual parts, enabling training and development opportunities for the ranger team members and creating future career pathways and green job opportunities in our rural communities.
In 2020, as a response to the easing of covid- 19 lockdown the Park Authority responded to community and landowner concerns of the anticipated influx of visitors to the area and restricted facilities to accommodate them, by creating a seasonal ranger team to help support the existing 13 rangers services and our communities across the Park. This fledgling ranger team worked in partnership with the 13 ranger services to engage with visitors and enable safe and responsible access to the park and operated in key communities where visitor pressures were high. This allowed ranger teams to work together for the first time on the ground patrolling and engaging with visitors together with consistent messages and information. Challenges faced by the rangers at the time with restricted facilities for visitors, due to pandemic restrictions, resulted in increasing undesired behaviours, with visitors having to adapt to new ways of holidaying in the park and not being equipped for this. These challenges facilitated in the coming together of the Family of Cairngorms Ranger Services through partnership working and support out on the ground. This development of relationships has also enabled closer working with Police Scotland and Scottish Fire and Rescue Service with joint patrols and engagement events. This understanding and communication between ranger services and public agencies has enabled a consistent approach to key messages around visitor management and engagement leading to an improved experience for visitors to the park and reduced negative impacts of visitors to land managers and rural communities.
Up until 2020 13 site-based ranger services operated across the Cairngorms National Park. These ranger services are employed by a variety of organisations, including local authorities, private estates and charitable trusts. These ranger teams largely worked in isolation for much of the year, coming together annually for get-togethers to discuss key issues and areas of work. The work of these ranger services were and are vital for welcoming visitors and connecting people to nature for the areas they work in. The establishment of the Cairngorms National Park Authority ranger service, with a team of rangers working across the entire area of the park has not only increased the ranger coverage across the park and its communities but has also allowed the Family of Cairngorms Ranger Services to come together and develop into a ranger team that is delivering visitor welcome and engagement together. This has enabled establishment of consistent and clear visitor messages and understanding across the park which in turn is positively changing visitors’ behaviors and experiences of connecting with nature in a responsible and sustainable way. This has mainly been achieved by improved communication between ranger teams, police and fire services, across the park, which in turn has led to collective data collection and reporting which feed directly into national visitor management groups, development of new visitor information leaflets and signage, regular team communications and meetings and a platform for sharing best practice and innovation.