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2025-09-17-0838
KML files containing details about rights of way
Rights of way data for the 116 authorities that are listed in the table below have been released with an open licence.
Please e-mail me
if you know of any other authority
that releases their data with an open licence.
My thanks to those that have already done this.
Here's a link to a map showing the areas where data has been released.
Many authorities originally released their data under terms equivalent to the
Ordnance Survey Opendata Licence.
In April 2015,
the
Ordnance Survey
adopted the
Open Government Licence.
Here's a link to more details about the change in OS licensing.
An authority's Definitive Map is the authoritative source of their rights of way. The details of the public rights of way network contained in an authority's data are for information only, and are an interpretation of the Definitive Map, not the Definitive Map itself, and should not be relied on for determining the position or alignment of any public right of way. For legal purposes, an authority's data does not replace their Definitive Map. And changes may have been made to the Definitive Map that are not included in their data. The authority's data contains Ordnance Survey data © Crown copyright and database right 2026. Attempting to view this data with more detail than 1:10000 may produce an inaccurate rendering of the route of a public right of way.
I have derived KML from each authority's data. So, on this web page, I'm providing the data about rights of way in KML format:
Aside: each of the above links takes you to the appropriate folder for that authority. The URL for the folder uses a two character code that identifies the authority. For example, "BL" is used in the URL for Barnsley. There are more details about these two character codes on this web page.
As well as providing KML files for each authority, this web site also provides a KML file containing the data about public rights of way for all of the 116 authorities. As such a KML file would be very large, it is only provided as a KMZ file (a zipped version of the KML file). Even so, the KMZ file is still large.
There are in fact two versions of the KMZ file. The first one is in the file converted.kmz. This file provides the KML using the basic format that is used by this web site for all the authorities. For each public right of way, this basic format has the code of the authority (e.g., BL meaning Barnsley), a unique number within the authority for the public right of way, the name or number of the parish/community, the name or number of the public right of way, the type of the public right of way (i.e., footpath, bridleway, ...) and occasionally some additional information about the public right of way that has been obtained from the data supplied by the authority.
The second KMZ file is called augmented.kmz. The KML in this file has some additional information. For each public right of way, the augmented format also includes its length (in miles), the longitude and latitude of its first point, the longitude and latitude of its last point, the eastings and northings of its first point and the eastings and northings of its last point.
These two KMZ files will be updated whenever a new authority is added or the data for an authority is updated.
This web site also provides links to the original datasets, rights of way in CSV format and rights of way in GeoJSON format.