Without shelling out for access to the land registry? There are some signs that have appeared in a bit of woodland near me and I want to try to find the landowner and see what the craic is.

That’s tricky. Land registry does not always hold details of the owner as not everything is registered. Maybe look on maps and see if you can find local farmers who may know. It will probably be a case of knocking on doors.

Has it (or anywhere near) been the subject of a planning application?…..will be ownership info within if so

Nah, there’s some cheeky in the woods and some signs have appeared, at this point I don’t even know if they’re being put there by bodies of the busying kind, (they’re pretty shonky) or whether the actual landowner is pissed off and a conversation might help.

Land registry is £2 to find out. Ideally you need the plan and the registration so that will be £4. Other than that it’s trawling the internet for news articles and planning applications. Or ask around. Most farmers seem to know who owns what bit of land locally.

Land Registry probably won’t have a record unless it’s changed hands since 1990. If you have a Town/Parish Council they might have a map.

Dress up in a suit, wellies and hardhat and stand about making notes and sucking your teeth occasionally and muttering something about HS3. The owner will soon make themselves known to you 🙂

I think I know where you’re talking about. I don’t know if the landowners are behind the signs, but they have been annoyed at some of the cheeky in the past year and that’s been discussed on some local MTB Facebook groups. Mainly it seemed to be the blind exit rut track spilling a pile of dirt into the road that tipped them over the edge.

It might be someone else though. Lockdown seems to have really brought out the wannabe trail cops everywhere, it’s like New Year on steroids: more people out more of the time, some now all indignant about things they otherwise wouldn’t see for most of the year. There’ve been people putting up unofficial NO BIKES signs on Yorkshire Water land

Turn up with a 20t excavator and start revving chainsaws that how we found out once at work.

Most of Scotland is digitised now https://scotlis.ros.gov.uk/

Do they have similar for south of the border?

Put some signs up and see what happens.

Searching for the owner of unregistered land