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2025-09-17-0838

GeoJSON files containing the public rights of way of Cornwall

The council of Cornwall provide a web page from where you can download their data about public rights of way in various formats including GML32, GEOJSON, KML, KMZ and CSV. For example, you can download the data as a KMZ file (but see the "Important Note" below). The Council also provides information about public rights of way on its online map. It may be that their map uses more up-to-date information.

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.

This web page says the data is made available by the council of Cornwall under the Open Government Licence. So it's possible for you to use this data provided you give an attribution.

Important Note: in the Council's KML/KMZ files, the coordinates of each point of each public right of way are coded using eastings,northings rather than longitude,latitude. I have used the phpcoord package (written by Jonathan Stott) to convert each eastings,northings pair in the Council's KML file to a longitude,latitude pair. This package is © 2005 Jonathan Stott and released with the GNU General Public License (GPL) Version 2.  Here is a link to a version of Cornwall's KML file that uses longitude,latitude pairs.

Elsewhere on this web site, there is a web page about how this web site provides the public rights of way of Cornwall in KML format. That web page explains how I've augmented the basic KML with additional information.

I've converted this augmented KML into GeoJSON. Besides giving the longitudes and latitudes of the route of a public right of way, each entry in the GeoJSON also has a name and a description.
The name will be something like:
CN|617|37\/3
There are three parts to the name: "CN" (meaning "Cornwall"), the id of the parish/community/area and the id of the path within the parish/community/area.
The description will be something like:
Fo|CN:22802|0.348|Gold@558|-4.19040|50.35105|-4.18649|50.34822|244264,52420|244533,52097
This gives other information about the public right of way. First, there is a two letter code giving its type which is one of Fo (meaning Footpath), Br (meaning Bridleway), Re (meaning Restricted byway) and BO (meaning Byway open to all traffic). Following this code, there are a unique name, the length in miles, any additional information obtained from the data supplied by the authority (or none), the longitude of its first point, the latitude of its first point, the longitude of its last point, the latitude of its last point, the eastings and northings of its first point and the eastings and northings of its last point.

The following GeoJSON files are available:
GeoJSON file for footpaths in Cornwall;
GeoJSON file for bridleways in Cornwall;
GeoJSON file for restricted byways in Cornwall;
GeoJSON file for byways open to all traffic in Cornwall.

Because some of these GeoJSON files are large, the GeoJSON is also available in a large number of smaller files. Each smaller file has information about public rights of way that are in a square that is 0.1 degrees longitude wide and 0.1 degrees latitude high. For example, the file 41W503Fo.json contains details about the Footpaths that are partly/wholly in the square that is west and north of -4.1 degrees longitude and 50.3 degrees latitude.
Here is a link to a zip file containing all the smaller GeoJSON files for Cornwall.

The latitude values for Cornwall range from 49.95 to 50.92. And the longitude values range from -5.71 to -4.17.