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.