Which part of the country has the most public footpaths, bridleways and byways for every square mile of land? Every council area in England and Wales, measured from the councils' own rights of way data.
England and Wales have a legal map of their public paths. Every county council and unitary authority keeps a definitive map of the footpaths, bridleways and byways that anyone may walk, and most now publish it as open data. Barry Cornelius's rowmaps site gathers those files from 149 highway authorities into one format. I placed every section of path in the council area it runs through, added up the miles and divided by the land area.
The answer to "where is the walking best?" depends on the yardstick. Per square mile, the winner is a small mill-town district in east Lancashire. Per mile of road, it is rural mid Wales. Per resident, it is mid Wales again by a distance. The map lets you switch between them.
| # | Council | mi / sq mi | miles |
|---|
Nine of the top ten per square mile sit in one block of hill country either side of the Lancashire and Yorkshire border: Rossendale, Calderdale, Pendle, Rochdale, Blackburn with Darwen, Oldham, Hyndburn, Burnley and Bury. Rossendale has 407 miles of path in 53 square miles. Only Malvern Hills, sixth, breaks the run.
These were places where people lived and worked spread across the hillsides long before the mills, in farms and weaving hamlets joined by packhorse tracks and field paths. The towns grew in the valleys, but the network on the slopes above them stayed on the definitive maps drawn up in the 1950s. Small fields and a crowded landscape mean a lot of paths in a small space. That is a likely reason, not something this data can prove.
Change the yardstick and the map turns over. Powys, the biggest council area in England and Wales, is only 72nd per square mile, but with so few roads and people it has 3,388 yards of right of way for every mile of road and 249 feet of path for every resident, first on both counts. Ceredigion and Gwynedd follow it per resident. Wales as a whole has 2.8 miles per square mile against England's 2.3.
At the other end are the big towns and outer London. Harrow has 0.06 miles of right of way per square mile, the fewest of any council with a definitive map, behind Enfield, Norwich, Havering and Barnet. Most of their old field paths were built over or became ordinary streets long before the definitive maps were drawn, which is the likely reason rather than something the data shows.
Scotland has no definitive maps. Since the Land Reform (Scotland) Act 2003, everyone has a right of responsible access to most land and inland water, so a path does not need to be a recorded right of way to be walked. Councils instead plan networks of "core paths", which are only patchily mapped as such in OpenStreetMap. Northern Ireland has very few recorded public rights of way. A per-square-mile league of rights of way would put both at the bottom for reasons of law, not landscape, so they are greyed out here.
Inner London is a legal gap too. The fourteen inner London boroughs were never required to make a definitive map, so they show none.
I first measured rights of way in OpenStreetMap, where volunteers tag paths as public footpaths, bridleways or byways. Against the council data, OpenStreetMap has 57% of the length. Where a council's data has been loaded into it, as in Lancashire, Essex and Lincolnshire, the two agree within a few per cent. Elsewhere large parts are missing. The mapped length has almost tripled in ten years, from 28,275 miles in 2016 to 79,896 in 2026. So I use the council data, and OpenStreetMap only for the ten councils with no open data, where the figures are a floor.
Rights of way: the "augmented" files from rowmaps.com for all 149 authorities that publish open data, which give each path section's type, length in miles and end points. Sections supplied twice by overlapping datasets (two national parks, and the old and new Cumbria) were dropped, 4,233 in all. Each section was assigned to a local authority district (ONS, December 2024) by the midpoint of its ends. Where a council's total came to less than 80% of the length mapped in OpenStreetMap, which happens only where that council publishes no data, OpenStreetMap was used instead (ten councils, marked in the table).
OpenStreetMap lengths and road lengths: the ohsome API (HeiGIT), snapshot of 27 July 2026, clipped to each council's generalised boundary. Land area: computed from ONS boundaries clipped to the coast. Population: ONS mid-2025 estimates via Nomis.
Data and code: github.com/Tristan-Hotham/footpaths · Paper and archived release: Zenodo · Write-up: blog. More data studies: tristan-hotham.github.io.