How England's Oldest Road Was Nearly Lost Forever

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In Scotland we do have rights of way but they arn't as important as in England because we have the Right to Roam here which means we can go walking pretty much anywhere. Rights of way are important in the few cases that are restricted though, like farmyard which you cannot walk through unless you are on a right of way.

πŸ‘οΈŽ︎ 17 πŸ‘€οΈŽ︎ u/Sorlud πŸ“…οΈŽ︎ Jun 08 2020 πŸ—«︎ replies

I dont give a rats arse about 90% of the subjects in a Tom Scott video, but i do watch them all when i come across them.

πŸ‘οΈŽ︎ 46 πŸ‘€οΈŽ︎ u/Hemmingways πŸ“…οΈŽ︎ Jun 08 2020 πŸ—«︎ replies
πŸ‘οΈŽ︎ 9 πŸ‘€οΈŽ︎ u/dunkelweiss πŸ“…οΈŽ︎ Jun 08 2020 πŸ—«︎ replies

"This road is 100 miles long (160 km), and there are over 2000 km (1200 miles) of other roads like it." What the fuck UK? Pick one and commit. Having both metric and customary is worst of both worlds.

πŸ‘οΈŽ︎ 13 πŸ‘€οΈŽ︎ u/CrabbyBlueberry πŸ“…οΈŽ︎ Jun 08 2020 πŸ—«︎ replies

Anyone else discovered a love of walking miles on end through the countryside in the past few months?

πŸ‘οΈŽ︎ 3 πŸ‘€οΈŽ︎ u/crazyhouse2468 πŸ“…οΈŽ︎ Jun 08 2020 πŸ—«︎ replies
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Depending on which archaeologist you talk to, the Icknield Way is described either as the oldest road in Britain, or more carefully, as one of Britain's oldest still-surviving paths. It stretches more than 100 miles across southeast England, and there have been people walking parts of this path since before recorded history. Parts of it are still in common use. I drove here on the Icknield Way for a couple of miles, it was just a regular country road. But parts of it were nearly lost forever. All over the English countryside, you'll signs that say "public footpath", or if you're also allowed to ride a horse on it, "public bridleway". These are formal rights of way, protected by law, and there are more than 200,000 kilometres of them across the country. Landowners do not get a say in who walks along those paths and it's a criminal offence to block them. The trouble is that some of those paths have been lost. Sure, they might have existed once, historically, the public had a right of way, but they're not marked down anymore. There's meant to be a definitive map, but it's not complete. It's almost like the landowners at the time it was drawn up might've had a say in what was written down. - Back in the '50s and '60s was when the legislation was introduced to actually map public rights of way for the first time. But it was done on a local level, so there were definitely inconsistencies across areas. People understood the guidance differently or even in some small areas, there might have been local opposition that meant rights of way weren't recorded that should have been. So we've got an incomplete network. - Despite the Icknield Way being thousands of years old, legally opening every last bit of it to the public took a lot of effort. Not just research, but also some fairly militant walking enthusiasts turning up at public inquiries. This bit I'm walking on wasn't marked on maps until the 1980s. As the 21st century approached, the government agreed that having these maybe-paths all over the country might be a bad idea. - In the year 2000, the Countryside and Rights of Way Act opened large areas of country for open access for the first time, but at the same time, landowners wanted some certainty about the rights of way map. If they bought a piece of land, if there was a right of way on there or not. So as part of the negotiation, there was a cutoff date introduced and that was the 1st of January 2026, and that was basically 25 years on from that legislation, so we've got, you know, just under five years to find all these paths and put them back on the map. - So now, under law, England has until January 1st, 2026 to find and log all its footpaths. And as with any project with a deadline that's a long way away, very little has happened over the last couple of decades. But with five years to go, the Ramblers charity decided to try and solve the problem using very modern tools. They asked thousands of people to check one bit of the map each. - They were shown that square on the current OS map and they were shown that square on a couple of historic maps from about 120 years ago, and then we basically got people to draw on the difference, do a big spot the difference. We think we've found tens of thousands of miles of lost rights of way. This isn't about creating new rights of way, it's about recording ones that should've been recorded in the first place. Most landowners understand the rights of way network brings billions of pounds to the economy each year. We find a lot of farmers and landowners like to use that public rights of way network as well. - That is a very... political answer. There are certainly stories in the last few decades of landowners intimidating or bribing locals or officials into just quietly forgetting about some paths. There are plenty of people who would very much like the public to "get off their land", and suddenly finding out that there's a right of way through your farm is often not going to be appreciated. - They can only really object on the basis of the historical evidence. They can't object on the basis that they don't want that path or that path is inconvenient, but we really want to work with landowners. There's no point, from a walker's perspective, a path just going through somebody's garden if there's a way round that. So, you know, in some ways, the real work starts now and that's about proving that these paths were historically public rights of way and actually submitting them to local authorities so they can be put back on the map. - England is approaching a point that's very rare in history. It started with the first concept of owning land, which was absolutely not some human universal constant. Then, through the feudal system and the idea of all land ultimately belonging to the monarch. Then, to private landowners and folk knowledge of footpaths. After all, when most people never went more than a few miles from home for their whole lives, why would you need a map of the footpaths? Everyone knew what they were, they were common knowledge passed down from generation to generation. But now we're in an age of GPS, of precise maps, and of the expectation that everything will be on some database somewhere. The process of defining who has the right to walk where in England has been going on for millennia, since before written history, but it ends soon, January 1st 2026. After that, the definitive map is set, and there are no mysterious maybe-footpaths out there. If the Icknield Way hadn't been marked, it could've been forgotten about. Either it exists on the map or it's gone forever. It's not often that you see a millennia-long process come to an end. Thank you to Jack Cornish from the Ramblers and everyone who helped with my research. I've put links to my sources in the description.
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Channel: Tom Scott
Views: 1,053,185
Rating: 4.9744778 out of 5
Keywords: tom scott, tomscott, things you might not know, icknield way, ramblers, footpaths
Id: 3dYc0Ouxhx0
Channel Id: undefined
Length: 5min 41sec (341 seconds)
Published: Mon Jun 08 2020
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