How about Byways? Or BOATS? Find out now!
(This doesn’t include Scotland because rights-of-way things are different there.)
On the excellent Bridleways.uk website you can filter England, Wales and Northern Ireland’s rights of way network by type of track. Footpaths, bridleways, restricted byways and byways open to all traffic (BOAT). You also browse it by county*.
*although I’m not sure whether ‘county’ is the current word, maybe ‘local authority’ is more accurate?
The site is essentially the work of one person who rides horses: “Having recently started horse riding, I found it difficult to find good routes to go hacking. Being a nerdy software developer I decided to create UK Bridleway Finder to help me and the equestrian community find hacking routes in their area.”
With bicycles having essentially the same sort of rights-of-way access as horse riders, this makes the website very useful for us lot too.
Being something of a right-of-way nerd myself, I’ve spent probably a bit too long on Bridleway.uk over the festive break. Mainly confirming my suspicions that my county of residence (Lancashire) is pretty poorly served by bridleways (427 miles), especially in comparison to the amount of footpaths blanketing the county (4463 miles).
Anyway, I came away with a couple of interesting thoughts. Firstly, which counties have the most bridleways, and secondly whatever happened to the Trail For Wales campaign?
While I badger the bods over at Cycling UK for a Trails For Wale update, here’s the top 10 counties for bridleways, byways and BOATS:
Top 10 counties with the most bridleways, byways and BOATs
- North Yorkshire, 2229 miles
- Westmorland & Furness, 1494 miles
- Northumberland, 1395 miles
- Hampshire, 898 miles
- Lincolnshire, 849 miles
- Norfolk, 815 miles
- Nottinghamshire, 700 miles
- Devon, 658 miles
- West Yorkshire, 646 miles
- Cumberland, 529 miles
That’s mega depressing Greater Manchester has only 153miles!!!
This is ace.
700 miles of BWs/By in Notts.
Always knew there were loads here.
Lincolnshire high too.
A decent chunk of that will be the PBW I’d have thought?
I’m on the border of two big counties. Less than 90 miles between them. 🙄Â
Zero.
Wow, shocking that Easy Sussex, which is quite rural, only has 54 miles of bridleway, Kent 84 and West Sussex marginally better at 112.
That’s shockingly crap for such a large chunk of rural SE England.
Not sure this is correct considering Derbyshire has High Peak Trail, Tissington Trail, Monsal Trail, Manifold Trail (part of!), Cromford Canal, Carsington Water etc. Plus the many ‘proper’ bridleways that criss-cross the county. Seems on the low side to me.
Muffin Man, Peak District’s RoW are only 11% bridleways. 11% below the national average of 22%.
We are woefully served.
Staffordshire 167miles
Clunky site, I prefer this one for search bridleways https://footpathmap.co.uk/
Bridleways.uk is nice but comparing miles of bridleways for local authorities doesn’t mean much because the local authority areas vary so much in size. It also misses paths where it’s permitted to cycle on (such as towpaths).
I made maps normalising by local authority area, population, and number of roads: https://laurencetennant.com/cyclability.html . The one I like most uses number of roads, although it still undercounts open access moorland areas.
Wow – @hyper_real is that your own work? It’s very impressive
Looking good in my area, nice thing to geek out on
Very timely post, with the recent weather I’ve taken up exploring the local Bridleways.
Had some fantastic adventures – I also discovered a private track that a farmer has opened up as a permissive bridleway that has some spectacular views of the Duddon Estuary. It also shaves off a massive hill, which is nice!
Not sure about the rest of the country but they are not well maintained here to be honest, so carry a puncture repair kit!
The split of byways vs bridleways is interesting (or not!)
Cambridgeshire seems to be massively swayed towards byways at over 60% of rideable miles. Versus neighbouring Hertfordshire where byways are around 10% of rideable miles.
EDIT: Now I’ve actually registered and looked at the map, the Cambs byway excess looks to be due to the masses of byways in the Fens.
I find that hard to believe living on the eastern edge of Brighton. Seems a lot more than that around me. I do know that a lot of the ones closest to home don’t show as such on the map despite being signpostedÂ
Thank you! Datawrapper.de does all the heavy lifting to make the nice visualisation.
I can’t figure out why their numbers for Sussex are so low. In the table for my map Lewes alone has 300km of off road cycle routes, granted some of which are “tracks" rather than bridleways. But even on the bridleways.uk map Sussex has a high density of bridleways.
tbf, I expected zero.
Does that font trigger anyone else?
I’ve done quite a bit of horse riding in mid-Wales and there were a lot of horse-friendly routes there (as you can’t lift a horse over a stile or fence so footpaths are rarely a good bet!)
Down in the South Downs vicinity I’m not sure I notice what’s a bridleway and what’s a footpath (I consider the latter fair game on a MTB) and what’s just somewhere we ride because there’s a trail there. You only have to do a little bit of historical digging to see that the whole concept of countryside ownership is an archaic travesty – yes well done, you had particularly vicious ancestors who subjugated ours, so you get to tell us where we can ride our bikes…
Your expectations are correct. The map is wrong.
Although interesting, the data on the Bridleways.uk website does not seem robust enough to use for making any kind of comparison.
For example in Surrey it claims that there are only 2.7miles of BOATs.
Even just considering the ones very local to me such as Wolvens Lane on Leith, Beggars Lane, Sheepwalk Lane and Hogden Lane on Ranmore there is at least 10 miles. I know that there are many more further in to the Surrey Hills, and plenty around the military areas further West.
This makes me question the quality of the data elsewhere.
Try Herefordshire:
BOATS – 44.5 miles
Byways – 3 miles
Bridleways – 27.3 miles
Footpaths – 2167 miles
Total Rideable: 74.7 miles
Data seems terribly inaccurate just from a casual glance. Surrey should be in the top ten easily, perhaps even top 5. CBA creating an account to see what that database says.
Edit: Surrey apparently has 1.2 miles of bridleway / Boat per sq mile compared to 0.7ml in North Yorks. Fun thread, but…Â
Staffordshire has 0 BOATS according to that.Â
That’s our planned ‘off road’ motorcycle ride in Staffordshire this Saturday knackered then… 🤔
Seems to be very inaccurate imho.
The top three in the article are North Yorkshire, Westmorland & Furness, and Northumberland. Guess what the top three largest counties by area are. It shows that you need to normalise by area or some other metric as length alone is meaningless.
I did send my maps and article to the Singletrack editorial team a few months ago as an article idea, but didn’t get a response. I’m glad this article got published as it’s interesting topic, but it’s a shame to base it on the bridleways.uk data because its a site focussed on horse-riding not off-road cycling (so does not include a lot of cyclable paths), does not appear to be accurate, and mixes together counties and local authority areas.
Sounds like Singletrack should read their emails…Â