Have you been keeping track of government announcements on the provisions for correcting omissions that occurred when the definitive maps were being drawn up in the 1950s and 1960s? If not, you may be unaware of the potentially quite serious consequences for our path network.
Quite a lot of rights of way were omitted when the definitive maps were drawn up. The situation was worse in some parts of the country than others. As parish councils were quite heavily involved, there were particular problems where local landowners and their estate employees dominated the parish council. Kent fared better than many counties but, as I shall explain shortly, even we have cause for concern and anyway we like to walk outside Kent too, don't we?
Legislation in 2000 provided that any such right of way that was in existence in 1949 would be extinguished on 1 January 2026 unless it had by then been added to the definitive map. In early 2022, recognising the complications of introducing the cut-off, and the lack of capacity in Defra, the government announced that this provision would be repealed. Organisations such as the Ramblers, British Horse Society, Open Spaces Society, and others such as the Kent Countryside Access Forum had been lobbying for this and were delighted. Then, just over a year later, the then environment secretary announced that the cut-off would not be repealed but an extra five years would be allowed, until 1 January 2031, to make applications to get the paths onto the definitive map.
Many of the omitted paths are no longer evident on the ground, and proving that they are nevertheless rights of way that should be added to the definitive map requires much painstaking historical research; this involves the examination of tithe maps, Inland Revenue valuation maps from the 1910s, maps of proposed railways that were never built and much else besides. Because of the enormous amount of work involved and because we have a fairly rich path network in Kent, we will be quite selective about which of these ancient routes we investigate and seek to add to the definitive map, focusing on those that bridge gaps in the network and make existing paths much more useful.
There is another category of affected path that is a much greater cause of concern. These are paths that are currently in use but are not on the definitive map. The government set up a working party known as the Stakeholder Working Group including representatives of both path users and landowners to review the way that paths get added to the definitive map. The Group made a strong recommendation that paths still in use should be exempt from extinction at the cut-off date. The latest government announcement informs us that this recommendation is being rejected and such routes, if they were in existence in 1949, will be extinguished despite currently being in use.
Why is this such a worry? Well, there are quite a lot of these and it is very likely that you have at some time relied on one for a walk. If you glance at your Ordnance Survey Explorer map you will see a lot of "white tracks". It is impossible to tell from the map the status of these routes. There are many instances where such tracks link two recorded public rights of way or link a right of way to a public road and are in use for that purpose by walkers. If such linking routes became unavailable then the public rights of way would be rendered dead ends and of much diminished value to walkers.
Ideally we'd research them all and get applications in where needed before 2030 but we simply haven't the resources. Of course the Ramblers is campaigning nationally but it is also something you might like to raise with your MP and with candidates in the General Election. Take action or say goodbye to some favourite paths.
It is interesting to note that the Welsh government has agreed to abolish the cut-off date so that there will be no extinction of unrecorded rights of way in Wales.