Why old maps are the best place to start

Almost every parish in Britain is criss-crossed with lines that no longer exist on the ground. Lanes that once linked a farmhouse to the church, footpaths that took children to school, tracks severed by a bypass, a reservoir or an airfield. None of them vanished completely. They left marks on paper, and those marks are the most reliable starting point you have.

The trick is to choose the right map. Pretty parish maps are lovely to look at, but the detailed county series sheets surveyed at 1:2500 — roughly twenty-five inches to the mile — are what you want. At that scale, individual gates, stiles, ponds and kinks in a lane are all shown. The six-inch series is useful for the wider picture, but it generalises away exactly the small details that reveal where a path actually ran.

Keep in mind that a map is a snapshot, not a record of truth. A path may appear on an 1890s sheet, be missing from a 1950s revision, and still be walkable today. The absence of a line is a question to investigate, not an answer.

Reading the clues buried in the symbols

Once you have a detailed sheet in front of you, learn its shorthand. In the county series, footpaths are usually shown as a single dotted line, bridleways as a dotted line with short cross strokes, and unmetalled lanes as two parallel broken lines. Hedges, walls and fences appear as fine continuous lines, and a gap in one, with a path running through it, tells you the route was used often enough to need a gate.

Other things worth hunting for:

• Abbreviations in the margins such as FP, BR, BW or "Tk" — a shorthand for footpath, bridleway or track that survives on later revisions.
• Boundary lines that follow a path. Parish boundaries were often drawn along established lanes, so a boundary that suddenly turns at right angles may be following something older.
• Names on the map itself. Field names like Footpath Close, Causeway Field, Lane Meadow or Stile Piece are the landscape telling you what used to be there.
• Structures with no road. A lone bridge, a ford or a flight of stone steps on a hillside is rarely decorative — something went over it.
• Short stubs at the edge of a road. A lane that stops dead after ten metres on a modern map often continues perfectly well in the field beyond.

Putting old and new side by side

The practical method is simpler than it sounds. Print both maps at the same scale, or use a tracing sheet over the older one. Align them on features that cannot have moved — a church tower, a crossroads, a railway bridge, the corner of a walled garden. Anchor on three points spread across the sheet rather than one, or your overlay will drift.

Then work methodically, square by square, and note every line that appears on one map and not the other. Mark each with a grid reference and a short description. You are building a list of candidates, not conclusions: a path missing from the modern sheet might be legally recorded on the definitive map and simply omitted for clarity, or it might be a genuine loss.

Overlays also reveal subtler changes. A lane that once ran straight may now bend around a Victorian railway embankment or a twentieth-century farmyard, leaving a straightened section in a neighbouring field. Following the old alignment across a modern aerial photograph often shows it as a faint band in the crop.

Parish records and the definitive map

Maps show you where to look; documents tell you whether the route had any public status. Start with the tithe map and its apportionment from the 1840s, then the enclosure award if your parish was enclosed. Both list landowners, occupiers and field names, and both frequently mark footpaths and occupation lanes that predate the national survey.

Next, ask your county council's rights of way team to see the definitive map and statement. This is the legal record of public paths, and it will show whether your lost lane is already recorded, was recorded and later diverted, or is absent altogether. Parish council minute books, old school board records mentioning the route children took, and newspaper reports of closures or accidents can all add weight.

If you believe a public path has been omitted, the formal route to correcting the record involves submitting evidence to the surveying authority. That is a slow process, and the evidence standard is high — which is exactly why the map comparison and document work matter so much.

Ask the people who still walk it

No archive knows a parish as well as the people who have worked its fields for forty years. Farmers, retired postmen, long-standing ramblers and the oldest members of the village can point out a gap in a hedge that "was always the way to Cooper's" or a lane that was ploughed out after the war.

Ask open questions and let people talk. Take your maps with you — people find it far easier to point at a line than describe one. Walk the route yourself in winter, when vegetation is low, and look for worn lines in grass, older hedgerow trees along one side of a field, stone gateposts with no gate, and sections of path that are noticeably smoother underfoot than the surrounding ground.

Recording and sharing what you find

Write it up while it is fresh. For each route, record the grid references at start and finish, the maps and documents that show it, the physical evidence you saw, and the names of anyone who remembered it in use. A simple, consistent format means your notes are useful to others, not just to you.

Then share them. Local history societies, the parish council and the county archive all welcome well-evidenced research, and the rights of way team will be interested in anything that supports a claim. Always respect landowner privacy, keep to public paths when you walk, and never assume a line on an old map gives you a right to cross a field today. The pleasure is in the detective work — and in putting a name back onto a route that four generations have forgotten.