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2025-09-17-0838

GeoJSON files containing the public rights of way of North Somerset

The council of North Somerset have provided me with MapInfo files that contain the details of their public rights of way. The MapInfo files seem to have been created on 27th February 2014. 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.

The Council points out that their Definitive Map is the authoritative source of the Council's public rights of way. The details of the public rights of way network contained in the Council's data are for information only, and are an interpretation of the Definitive Map, not the Definitive Map itself which carries a relevant date of 26 November 1956, and should not be relied on for determining the position or alignment of any public right of way. For legal purposes, the Council'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 Council's data contains Ordnance Survey data © Crown copyright and database right 2014. 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.

The MapInfo files were made available by the council of North Somerset under terms equivalent to the Ordnance Survey OpenData Licence. When I e-mailed the Ordnance Survey about the councils that had, during the last few years, successfully obtained an exemption from the Public Sector Mapping Agreement and released their data under terms equivalent to the Ordnance Survey OpenData Licence, they replied All data exempted by Ordnance Survey is now covered by the Open Government Licence (OGL), which superseded its own OS OpenData licence in April 2015. So it's possible for you to use this data provided you say that it is public sector information released by the council of North Somerset under the Open Government Licence.

Elsewhere on this web site, there is a web page about how this web site provides the public rights of way of North Somerset 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:
NS|AX11|10\/10
There are three parts to the name: "NS" (meaning "North Somerset"), 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|NS:67|0.101|Butcombe|-2.69898|51.35616|-2.69775|51.35499|351424,162130|351508,161999
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 North Somerset;
GeoJSON file for bridleways in North Somerset;
GeoJSON file for restricted byways in North Somerset;
GeoJSON file for byways open to all traffic in North Somerset.

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 26W513Fo.json contains details about the Footpaths that are partly/wholly in the square that is west and north of -2.6 degrees longitude and 51.3 degrees latitude.
Here is a link to a zip file containing all the smaller GeoJSON files for North Somerset.

The latitude values for North Somerset range from 51.29 to 51.49. And the longitude values range from -2.99 to -2.6.