Unclaimed Land Videos: Exploring Adverse Possession and Rights of Way

Hello, my name is Rafe Roughton from unclaimedland.co.uk. We’re the premium mapping service for unregistered land in England and Wales. Subscribe to us to access, maps covering every metre of unregistered land in England and Wales So today I’m going to be talking about adverse possession and rights of

way How do footpaths and highways affect your claim? It’s quite a complicated topic so you want to make sure you talk to a lawyer before engaging in a claim and definitely before submitting because it’s very dependent on on the ground facts on on need cases so I can only give you a vague overview of

of the situation. Now basic principle with adverse possession is you can’t claim land which has a right of way or a highway going over it.

You can buy land, you can sell land with a footpath going over it You can’t adverse possess it, it’s not possible There’s four different types of rights of way There’s footpaths, bridleways, restricted and byways and byways open to all traffic There are rights of ways and then you also have highways 

normal roads The line can be a bit blurred between byways and highways So some green lanes in the country still exist The roads may not be a byway in respect to a right of way, they are a highway How you can tell, on OS maps obviously most roads are coloured orangey yellow on them byways which are highways 

they’re green lanes which are highways let’s say they have green dots on the road and they tend to just be in the countryside often going nowhere they may often not even tarmac theyre just dirt tracks but they are highways byways, footpaths and right of ways theyre on osmaps but i recommend using our 

 sister project rights of way dot uk its a free mapping service which maps out most of the rights of ways in england and wales it doesnt do london because london is doesnt produce maps for their rights of way but it covers most of the rest of england and wales so down to the law a footpath width is between 

1 and 1.8 metres and you can’t claim that, that’s unclaimable so if you have a field with a footpath running through it you’ll just have to claim two separate bits either side of the footpath and have a have a gap equivalent to the width of a footpath in your claim.

The gap is as you can see its variable and its dependent on your particular case so it varies how wide right of way can be.

Depending on the on the ground facts so this is why you need to get a lawyer involved you can quite often tell for example if its by the side of a field or if its going through a hedgerow or something like that you can quite often tell the width but you still would want to get a lawyer involved uhm so

with bridleways it can be between 2 and 3 metres the width and with byways with both types of byways it’s generally between 3 and 5 metres with highways it’s similar obviously anything tarmacked you can’t claim it i’d say with highways a good rule is to look at the ditches on either side of the highway 

anything between the two ditches in the countryside i wouldn’t go for it i think most likely that is part of the highway and that’s not claimable so let’s have a look at how you can tell if there’s a right-of-way passing over your plot of land you’re looking to adverse possess so head to rightsofway.uk 

there we are if you’re on a mobile phone go to access our maps and type in type in your your area your your county you’re looking for and click the map link im just gonna go for the main england and wales map this works on pcs it doesnt its tarder on mobile phones so if youre on a pc id use it this ok

so lets just zoom in and have a look at how we use this system so i believe we are in east suffolk and you can see here right this right of the way this is a footpath appears to be it appears to be dead ending in the middle of fields so which is interesting but you don’t want to be claiming you won’t

be able to claim anything where this yellow line is on the map that is the legal location of the footpath most likely i mean this data is dependent on the council’s own data so there may be mistakes but it’s generally pretty accurate i’d say it’s much more likely there’s a mistake with open screen maps 6:36 than there is with the councils data which this site is using os maps as well generally pretty accurate id say this is slightly more accurate because its getting data straight from the council rather than just looking at on the ground facts which is obviously more more useful for walkers you know they’re

not interested in where the legal route goes they’re more interested in where the actual route goes because there can be a difference these are footpaths, you can tell by clicking on it, footpath, theres the footpath numbers, you can toggle between different rights of way so lets take off footpaths and

zoom out this one is this ones a bridal way footpaths are obviously very common bridal ways are fairly fairly common byways are much less common depending on where you are there we’ve got some byways here so this is a restricted byway and this is a byway opener and all traffic obviously it doesnt really

matter because the width for those is the same anyway once you know is your perspective plot highway free right away free then you’re good to go and happy adverse claiming remember we’ve got a special deal on our unclaimed land maps its £29.95 per month this is a limited time deal so bye now thank you 

very much