A byway in the United Kingdom is a minor secondary or tertiary road. In 2000 the legal term 'restricted byway' was introduced to cover roads on which it is possible to travel by any mode (including on foot, bicycle, horse-drawn carriage etc.) but not using 'mechanically propelled vehicles'.
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In England & Wales, a Byway Open to All Traffic (BOAT) is a highway over which the public have a right of way for vehicular and all other kinds of traffic but which is used by the public mainly for the purpose for which footpaths and bridleways are used. (United Kingdom Road Traffic Regulation Act 1984, section 15(9)(c), as amended by Road Traffic (Temporary Restrictions) Act 1991, Schedule 1). Byways account for less than 2% of England's unsurfaced Rights of Way network.
A byway open to all traffic is sometimes waymarked using a red arrow on a metal or plastic disc or by red paint dots on posts and trees.
On 2 May 2006 the Countryside and Rights of Way Act 2000 reclassified all remaining Roads Used as Public Paths as restricted byways. The public's rights along a restricted byway are to travel:[1]
In rural areas such roads can often be unmetalled – when they are known as green lanes. Such roads are lawful highways open to all traffic, although they often have the appearance of being no more than glorified tracks.
Some by-ways that have not been over modernised retain traces of the aggers (or ditches) that originally ran along each side of the lane; good examples of this can be seen along the side of the Roman "Ermine Street" as it crosses through Lincolnshire. By contrast, straight enclosure roads which were laid out between 1760 and 1840 run through the then newly enclosed lands with straight walls or hedges.
Many former Roman roads were later used as convenient parish boundaries – unlike the newer enclosure roads which rarely ran along boundaries but were solely designed to give access from a village to its newly created fields and to the neighbouring villages. The latter can often be seen to bend and change width at the parish boundary and as such reflect the work of the different surveyors who had each built a road from a village to its boundary. If the roads did not meet up exactly, which was quite common, a sharp double bend would result.
Many British byways are sinuous, as the poet G. K. Chesterton famously said:
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