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

- Jamie Darlow

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