PERUSE IT OR LOSE IT

We’re sitting on a labyrinth of lost trails in the UK, and without your help they could be gone forever

England and Wales are rich in rideable trails – by some estimates there are over 30,000km of bridleways and close to 10,000km of byways to play on, not to mention 146,000km of footpaths. Scotland’s just as well off, with around 15,000km of public rights of way. But until recently we’d always assumed that was our lot. With the country divided up over millennia and no new land springing up from the sea, we were hardly likely to see more rights of way drawn on our maps. How wrong we were... it turns out there could be some 49,000km of lost paths, potential singletrack heaven, dotted about the countryside. Who knew?

Well, it turns out all of us should have known about them, by right. Back in the 1950s and 60s a definitive map of the country was drawn up by the local authorities that supposedly charted every single right of way going. Much of the job was palmed off on local parish councils though and it turns out that some of them didn’t do a very good job… perhaps understandably, given their limited budgets and expertise.

“Some parishes remembered to include a path, and some didn’t,” explains Jack Cornish from The Ramblers, a walking charity that’s been spearheading the campaign to return rights of way to our maps.

“In some cases there will be a path recorded up to the edge of one parish, and there it’ll just finish because the next parish didn’t record it on their side.”

If you’ve ever ridden a dead-end trail or one that starts as a bridleway before mysteriously turning into a footpath or a supposedly private track, you’ll know the heartache of that one.

BLAIR’S LEGACY

The government wants to make amends, though, for 70 years of omissions. Or rather, the Blair government that passed the Countryside and Rights of Way Act 2000 wanted to. The idea was to give us until 2026 to find everything that was missing. Twenty six years should be long enough, surely? Well, now that there

authority, and provide the evidence that a path really has existed, and that on the balance of probabilities it was used by the general public – this involves physically hunting through local archives. The local authority can then make a decision on the application, although it can be contested almost endlessly.

As it stands, there’s no way The Ramblers can work through the lost ways in time, so it’s trying to prioritise what’s important, which involves using common sense. That means not trying to save paths that run through people’s gardens, instead focusing on dead ends, paths that link villages or perhaps connect to the coastal paths.

“We don’t want to claim everything, we’ve got 225,000 miles of established rights of way and we see very few issues with that in terms of landowners,”

Jack says. “Having a right of way will not make a farm uneconomical, most landowners see benefits in terms of the rural economy.”

What it will potentially do is unlock up to 25,000km of paths that could be used by mountain bikers, some half of the total so far discovered.

Why is the percentage so high, given the proliferation of existing footpaths exceeds bridleways by around three to one? “The evidence will be easier to find as they were historically carriageways or roads,” Jack says. “They therefore had higher status and more maintenance money or were public roads, whereas footpaths are more ephemeral.”

That’s the good news. Less good is that while this issue is clearly one that affects many outdoor user groups, from walkers to mountain bikers via horse riders, it’s The Ramblers that are doing most of the leg work with its Don’t Lose Your Way campaign. It’s a fantastic campaign calling for volunteers to find trails and prove they’re old rights of way, but the focus will definitely be on walking paths rather than mountain biking trails.

MISSING LINKS

The other drawback with The Ramblers Don’t Lose Your Way initiative is how long it takes to get rights of way returned to the map. “It’s not going to deliver anytime soon because there’s a huge backlog of submissions going through, and fundamentally the system is broken,” explains Kieran Foster from Cyclinguk. “That’s the trouble with 2026, you could put in a claim now and it could be 20 years until it’s resolved.” Clearly, a very small percentage of those lost kilometres will actually make it to print on an OS map, then.

Like The Ramblers, Cyclinguk is aware of the problem and has been in discussions with other user groups about how best to legitimise these rights of way. It’s currently on a mission to improve public access, find ways of upgrading missing rights of way, make impassable trails more accessible, and calm traffic on road sections of its routes. Called the Missing Links campaign, the goal is to create a network of traffic-free trails, which could be more useful for cyclists... but it’s not a dedicated push aimed at mountain bikers.