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
Co. Durham showing as 0 miles restricted byway, which is wrong as some of the routes across Hamsterley common and around Wolsingham have this status.
Clickety, click, click.Â
That data is miles out. I’m in East Sussex, where we apparently have just 1.2miles of BOAT and 4.9 miles of restricted byway. I can identify more than that just in the routes I ride from my door. This has got to be under-reporting by at least an order of magnitude.
I’ve double checked on the East Sussex.gov rights of way map, which confirms that there are more BOATs on just the levels than the bridleways map says there are in the whole of East Sussex.
It does seem low – but not to worry, there are plenty of tasty footpaths anyway 😉Â
Assuming we could obtain accurate(ish) information, it would be interesting to see the mileage per square mile of county, to provide some sort of comparison across counties.
Sorry to keep mentioning it, but you can see that in https://laurencetennant.com/cyclability.html
I’ll join in with the plaudits – cracking work, shame STW Towers didn’t pick up your email.
Now, if you could just spend a couple of hours creating a heatmap where thay all are – just Derbyshire Dales will do for now 😉Â
Thanks for the kind words. The best place for that type of data is the Strava heatmap set to mountain bike ride, I’ve found it a great resource for seeing where people actually ride: https://www.strava.com/maps/global-heatmap?hl=en-GB&sport=MountainBikeRide&style=dark&terrain=false&labels=true&poi=true&cPhotos=true&gColor=blue&gOpacity=100#9.73/53.1743/-1.6717
@hyper_real Excellent website! No email arrived in my inbox, soz 🙁 Glad to see such sites getting an airing on here anyway! ?
2026 miles, of bridleways!
Sounds great but – this is North Yorkshire. There are parts of North Yorkshire that are so far away from me, that in other parts of the UK they would be 3, 4 even 5 counties away!
Miles of Bridleway per Square mile would be a rather more useful stat.Â
Barely anything, which matches my efforts to find any to ride. The ones anywhere near me are well used by horsey types and poached to hell, basically impassable by foot or bike.
On the bright side, we have miles and miles and miles small back roads where you can ride for hours and hardly see a car 🙂
Interesting site, but woefully inaccurate.Â
It does show a fair few near me, but also fails to show loads that are sign posted as bridleways, etc.
We also have miles of unsurfaced county roads and unmetalied roads around here – all used regularly by horses and bikes.
Hmm, virtually the whole of the Consett-Sunderland sustrans route is missing (C2C) along with much of the Derwent walk (the other C2C), most of the Tyne valley cycle path. That’s at a cursory 5 min glance. Think I’ll stick to using the local council PROW sites.
No idea. There’s is no database of them all. Best number i can find is 6900 registered trails in the county. The single longest trail is about 700km and of the ten longest i’ve found, seven are over 150km…
Also, the county is 3 times the size of North Norkshire.
Obligatory “not living in the UK" comment. (Also, only about 1.8 million people in the same area!)
Cheers @hyper_real there’s some interesting information thereÂ
Northumberland has took me by surprise, I’d never had guessed at it being 3rd. It alway seems to lacking bridleways, unless of course there’s a lot of them but short distances. Northumberland has always been very rural, not industry driven so I’d thought that would have been a reason to be less.Â
Hmmm…. All the formal trails being mentioned (such as tissington, high peak) are often actually only Footpaths (if PROW’s at all) with permissive access granted to other user groups… So their exclusion may not be because of the consent to ride, the the legal right to ride them…
Similarly canal towpaths are effectively private land, some of which have PROW Footpath status, but all CRT ones have the owners consent for use by bike (but NOT a ridden horse).