Dartmoor recommends its mud

Trampling feet and the cars of 10 million visitors a year are turning Dartmoor National Park into a sea of mud. Yesterday the park's authority launched a pounds 400,000, three-year campaign to save the 365 square mile upland wilderness from erosion.

Most of the money will be spent on repairs, reseeding around footpaths and prehistoric standing stones with grass and heather. But the park authority said it also needed visitors to change their behaviour to cut erosion. Among 10 guidelines, it is asking them to stick in the mud, walking through it instead of taking a detour on to the grass and heather, to help prevent narrow eroded sections of path growing into broad ones. Visitors are also asked not to park cars on roadsides - or, better still, arrive by bus.