I’m Rafe Roughton, the lead developer and director of this site (and KGIS). I have always been passionate about rights of way wanting to encourage more people to use them and expand the network.
As a 14-year-old growing up in East Anglia, I noticed how many paths were mapped on the original OS maps from the 1880’s which had been lost over the years. See the wonderful online map archive at the National Library of Scotland [NLS] site for evidence of this. This contrasts with the well-established simplistic legal summary; once a right of way always a right of way.
So, what has happened? In many parishes of East Anglia (admittedly the region with the most paths), as much as 80% of the paths have been lost. Of course, many paths were private farmer routes, however, in many scenarios, this is not the case. As a teenager, walking along registered routes which nobody had used in decades, I had some landowners come up to me surprised anybody with using the route. Getting into conversation, they told me how they had been pressured, in the 1940s, to try and prevent any rights of way being registered on the powerful local landowners (often their employers). This is simply corruption – plain and simple. Everybody suffers.
The English and Welsh, our, rights of way network is admirable. No other country has a remotely similar network. It was wrought in the destruction of common land as compensation landowners had to give in exchange for cheap land. Since the 1880s, after all valuable common land had gone, pressure turned to exhausting rights of way which was often all to successful.
My goal is to rectify, as much as possible, this corruption which has damaged our network. I began my first claim for a lost historic right of way at 17 and continue to this day. Another important element is ensuring as many people as possible using our existing, amazing, network.
Indeed, as an enthusiast of both maps and rights of way I noticed the lack of good quality maps for users of rights of way in the UK. Barry Cornelius, of rowmaps, has a wonderful website (in fact this site uses the data created by him of which I send my upmost gratitude) however when out and about on your phone his website struggles. Using the same infrastructure which powers Unclaimed Land, my goal is to create a modern, fast and data saving software to display maps with compatibility in mind. My next goal is to create a feel mobile app for our users.