Lost Highways

The Country Land and Business Association's report on rights of way, The Right Way Forward (February 2012) highlighted a number of concerns which landowners have with the current rights of way system.

Chief among these, perhaps, is their concern over "lost highways", which is neatly summarised in the following extract from the report: "It is wholly wrong, and defies all sense of propriety and logic, that paths which have been unused for decades, centuries or even at all, can be 'discovered' out of the blue and opened up across land ... when there has been no use within living memory and there is no evidence of a path on the ground."

To understand how such highways can suddenly "appear" requires an appreciation, first, of the legal maxim "once a highway, always a highway" and, second, of the limitations of the Definitive Map and Statement (the official record of public rights of way).