Why these paths exist — and why they need us

Britain's public footpath network is one of the quiet marvels of this country. Something like 140,000 miles of rights of way stitch together farmland, woodland, moorland and coastline, and most of them survive on nothing more than goodwill and habit. The paths we wander along on a Sunday afternoon were argued over, mapped and defended by generations of walkers, parish councils and landowners. They are not a gift; they are a bargain, struck between the people who use the countryside and the people who work in it.

That bargain holds only as long as each side keeps up its end. For those of us setting out with boots on and a flask in the bag, it comes down to a handful of small courtesies — the sort of things that take ten seconds and protect access for everyone who comes after you.

Learn to read the waymarks

Before you rely on an app or a memory of a walk you did in 2011, learn the language of the path. Waymark discs and painted arrows are surprisingly consistent across the UK once you know what you are looking at:

• Yellow — public footpath. Walkers only, on foot.
• Blue — bridleway. Walkers, horse riders and cyclists.
• Purple — byway open to all traffic, though usually nothing more exciting than a green lane.
• Orange or red — restricted byway. Walkers, riders, cyclists and horse-drawn vehicles.

Your local highway authority holds the definitive map, the legal record of every right of way in the area, and is responsible for keeping paths open and signposted. Many councils also publish a rights of way officer's contact details — worth noting before you set out, because a path that has quietly vanished under a crop or a fallen branch stays vanished until somebody mentions it.

Gates, stiles and leaving things as you found them

This is the oldest rule in the book and still the one that causes the most trouble: close every gate behind you unless it is clearly propped or tied open. A gate wedged open on purpose is doing a job — moving stock between fields, or letting a tractor through. A gate left swinging is an invitation for somebody's sheep to end up on the road.

Use the stile or kissing gate rather than climbing a wall or hedge. If you are crossing a fence line, cross at the gap provided. And if you find a gate tied shut with baler twine, don't untie it and don't climb over it — note the grid reference and report it. Nine times out of ten it is a temporary measure, not a landowner making a point.

Dogs, livestock and ground-nesting birds

A dog off the lead is one of the great pleasures of a country walk, and one of the great hazards of it too. The law is blunt on this point: keep your dog under close control around livestock and on a lead wherever cattle, sheep or horses are grazing — even if your dog is the most placid creature in the county. Sheep with lambs and cows with calves can react to a dog at a distance of fifty metres, and a dog that has never chased anything in its life may still find the urge on a spring morning.

Between roughly March and July, keep dogs on the lead on open access land and along cliff-top paths anyway, for ground-nesting birds such as curlew, lapwing and skylark. A dog put through a patch of long grass can destroy a nest in seconds, and the birds will not return to it.

Bag it, carry it, bin it. Nothing sours a farmer's view of walkers faster than a bag of dog mess hung in a hawthorn bush. If there is no bin, it goes home with you.

Staying on the line through crops and verges

Where a footpath crosses a field of growing crops, the farmer is obliged to keep a reasonable line open — usually two metres wide for a footpath and three for a bridleway. Where no line has been reinstated, walk on the headland, the strip around the field edge, and stick to a single file. Trampled wheat or flattened barley means lost income, and it means the next walker gets a worse welcome.

Along narrow verges, walk in single file and step onto the field edge if you can do so without damage. Roads in the countryside have no pavements and often no sightlines; keep children and dogs on the inside, and give way to farm vehicles, which cannot stop as quickly as you might like.

If something's wrong, say something

Rights of way do get blocked, ploughed over, fenced off or simply forgotten. The remedy is rarely dramatic: a polite report to the highway authority's rights of way team, or a word with the parish council, does more good than any amount of fuming at a padlocked gate. Note where you were, what you saw and when. Obstructions are usually resolved quickly once they are on somebody's desk.

Take your litter home, leave gates as you found them, keep your dog in sight, and treat a working farm as a workplace rather than a backdrop. Do those things and the path stays open — for the dog walker at dawn, the family on a half-term ramble, and the generation after them who will never know how nearly these routes were lost.