LOSING YOUR WAY
On 1 January 2026, any footpath or right of way that isn’t marked on a map will be wiped out, meaning we could lose almost 50,000 miles of access. Here’s why that’s an issue and why our paths are so important.
In the year 2000, thousands of miles of countryside were opened up for people to roam over as they pleased. At that same moment, a clock started ticking. A requirement of the Countryside Rights of Way Act, which had just been passed and gave everyone the right to roam over open access land and rights of way, was that all rights of way were to be logged and mapped by 2026. Any not registered by that date would be extinguished. The path might still be there but your legal right to walk on it would not.
You might think that doesn’t matter very much because 1) we’ve already got loads of paths, 2) 2026 is ages away, and 3) the mountains are open access anyway.
Although all of those things are true, other things are also true. Paths and access aren’t evenly distributed, and while you can walk over every high point in the Lakes, if you’re restricted to a flatter place your options are limited to the corridors of paths criss-crossing the country – a situation many of us have had to grind our teeth through over the last year. In Scotland, where the right to roam extends across the entire country, this isn’t an issue, but for England and Wales, it’s vital.
There’s also a hell of a lot to do, most of it by as yet untrained volunteers. In the first stages of their Don’t Lose Your Way campaign, which aims to record every valuable right of way in England and Wales, the Ramblers sketched out 49,000 miles of lost paths. It’s not enough to point them out though, you also need to provide past proof of use, which means hours of sifting through old records – pretty much exactly how they got lost in the first place.
In the 1950s and ’60s the legal responsibility of mapping rights of way was passed on to local authorities (LAs) – a massive job carried out inconsistently across the country. Guidance was misinterpreted, the legitimacy of paths questioned, and some maps or documents couldn’t be found. Some paths come to a dead halt at the parish boundary, where on one side it was believed to be public but not on the other. In some cases, it is suspected that powerful landowners on the parish council influenced their removal. Mostly, it was accidental, due to the unwieldy nature of this massive task.
It’s still a huge task and the Ramblers are also pushing the Secretary of State for a five-year extension of the deadline on this account. But at the moment, 1 January 2026 is it.
So we spoke to some people engaged with protecting and promoting our rights of way to learn more about why this is so important.
“OUR PUBLIC PATHS ARE THE ARTERIES OF THE COUNTRYSIDE. IF PATHS AREN’T RECORDED THEY CAN BE BUILT OVER & WIPED FROM OUR MEMORIES”