Indeed, AFAIK, “right of way” applies (in English law) exclusively to “pedestrian passage”. Even stopping to take a photograph of the view strictly speaking requires permission.
It's a bit more complicated than that in England & Wales, as it's been the subject of much case law. You can stop to have a sandwich, admire the view, etc providing you don't stray from the PROW or cause an obstruction for others. You cannot however use a PROW as a destination to sit and watch the nearby horseracing circuit all day.
But yes, depending on the type of PROW, vehicles are usually not allowed:
- PROW footpaths are for pedestrians only, though a pram/buggy/wheelchair is also fine so 'footpath' may be a little misleading
- A bridleway is for pedestrians, bicycles including e-bikes, and horses.
- A restricted byway is for the same traffic as bridleways but also horse-drawn carriages (good luck on a lot of restricted byways!).
- Finally byways open to all traffic (aka BOATs, or 'green lanes') are open to all of the traffic of a restricted byway as well as motorised traffic, so they can be popular with off-road bikes and Land Rover drivers.
For the green laning, there's a map of byways here, and you'll notice they're sparse, concentrated mainly into a few areas, and not much of a connected network (though obviously you can join many of them up by normal roads):
https://www.bywaymap.com
In Scotland, ScotWays maintains a database of documented rights of way. It's a paid-for service (
https://scotways.com/crow/) though they also have a publicly-accessible map of historic paths:
https://scotways.com/heritage-paths/map/ - you can even filter it to just show paths originally used by smugglers
The way in which rights of way are documented in England & Wales is different to Scotland owing to how the legislation has come about over the years.
In England & Wales it's easy to think that you just look at an Ordnance Survey map and look for the green (1:25k) lines. But the Ramblers have had a project for a while called
Don't Lose Your Way -
https://dontloseyourway.ramblers.org.uk/. It is a map of paths which they believe are PROWs but not marked on the local authorities' 'definitive map', which in turn means they aren't on OS maps and landowners might not even know they have responsibility for them. Of course, some of them are now useless, because they cross through things which have been built on top of them since, such as this one which goes through a few living rooms and bedrooms in Roehampton:
The government had previously set a deadline for claiming these 'lost' rights of way, so the Ramblers were keen for people to login and add details and priority ratings for many of them so they can be added to the definitive maps before the deadline. Note that the PROW legislation excludes the 12 inner London boroughs.
Scotland is more on the side of just 'discovering' these rights of way through historical research then retrospectively adding them.
Relevant to this thread, is this right of way
https://scotways.com/heritage-paths/map/#zoom=15.840&lat=58.383766&lon=-3.711080 /
https://scotways.com/heritage-path/HP292/. It is a
Drove Road /
Medieval Road as ScotWays describe them. It goes over the level crossing. But, as mentioned, this doesn't necessarily confer any motorised vehicular rights. The driveway to the station cottage is a bit different because it relates more to the title deeds of the property and the way the land has been split up over the years. In the EE case the couple were going to introduce evidence obtained from the title deeds of the neighbouring old schoolhouse, which has been sold recently, but they then dropped this. I'd be interested to know what this evidence was going to be.
On an unrelated note, my favourite public right of way is one called
The Broomway. It is a byway open to all traffic which leads to Foulness Island, which is a military island usually closed to the public, with just a couple of road access points where QinetiQ will turn you away. The Broomway goes across Maplin Sands, and is tidal. So you can walk across it, maybe even make a horse suffer for a while, or drug some sort of dune buggy across it at low tide. Once you get onto Foulness, there are some PROW footpaths and bridleways, however if you've somehow managed to take a motor vehicle across to the island, there's basically one byway open to all traffic which doesn't even form a loop. Because you can't just stop on PROW footpaths for hours on end or camp on them, I imagine that if you misjudge the tide times and find yourself waiting for the next low tide, you'll be picked up by some military personnel and escorted over the road bridge. There used to be a general store on the island but I think it may have closed now. And there is/was a heritage centre which had some classic one-day-a-month opening. There are some guides who provide safe walks across though:
https://thamesestuaryman.co.uk/products/the-broomway-guided-walk
