A PROW for all seasons

“Stoke Lodge is the hub of its community, criss-crossed by spokes of connections and daily trips, old footpaths that emerge like ghosts in a drought, but are in use all the year, joining up people’s lives, stitching together a shifting but palpable community.”

That’s how Kathy Welham recently described Stoke Lodge and its well-used, long-established paths connecting residents on each side of the Lodge to school, to the shops, to the Trym Valley and Blaise, and to each other (for Kathy’s full text click here).

On 27 November the Public Rights of Way and Greens Committee will consider applications to register these key routes as public rights of way. Here’s the application map showing the four routes that were applied for back in May 2018:

You might be thinking “But since Stoke Lodge is already a village green, what’s the point of these applications?”. The answer is that the nature of public rights of way is different from village green rights – for one thing, they are truly public. So if these routes are registered, anyone who wants to try the Bristol Green Walk (a 7 mile (11km) route between Clifton Suspension Bridge and Penpole Lane, Shirehampton) will know that this section is on registered rights of way. Find out more about the Bristol Green Walk here.

Public rights of way are protected by law and cannot be obstructed. They are recorded on something called the ‘Definitive Map’ (although many rights of way are currently unrecorded, so the map isn’t actually as definitive as you might suppose!). There’s an interactive version of the Map here.

So whether it’s the route to school:

…or a walk to the shops:

…in winter:

…or from above:

…routes like these connect a community – and do their bit to keep all of us out of our cars and in the open air!

There’s exactly one month to go before we know whether these four new routes will be added to the Definitive Map. Fancy a walk? We’ll keep you posted!