The UK’s largest trail-riding organisation is one step closer to using a Wiltshire bridleway for its motorcycles, following a High Court ruling today.
The Trail Riders Fellowship has successfully challenged a decision by environment, food and rural affairs secretary Margaret Beckett refusing to classify the lane, which has been used by vehicles for decades, as a byway open to all traffic (BOAT).
The riders had used the lane, known as Preshute 12, which runs north from the A4 near Marlborough to join an unsealed road at Manton, as a motorcycle track until, in 2002, Wiltshire Council erected a horse stile across it.
In August, Beckett declined to confirm an order modifying the Wiltshire definitive map to show the lane as a BOAT on the basis that any public vehicular rights had been extinguished in 1972, when the lane was downgraded from a road used as a public path (RUPP) to a bridleway under the Countryside Act 1968.
She claimed that unless the reclassification effected extinguishment, it would have “no substantive legal effect”, merely entitling the surveying authority to show the RUPP as a bridleway in the definitive map even though it was being used as a BOAT.
However, High Court judge Lightman J said that, under a proviso to the Act that preserved any existing public access rights, a reclassification from a RUPP to a bridleway could not extinguish the vehicular rights.
“In my judgment, the legislation cannot and should not be construed as a side wind, repealing or amending the effect of the proviso,” he said. “I do not think that the necessary implication should be read into the 1968 Act that vehicular rights should be extinguished.”
R (on the application of Kind) v Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Administrative Court (Lightman J) 27 June 2005.
George Laurence QC and Ross Crail (instructed by Brain Chase Coles, of Basingstoke) appeared for the claimant; Jonathan Karas (instructed by the legal department to the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs) appeared for the defendant.
References: EGI Legal 27/6/05
