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A byway in the United Kingdom is a minor secondary or tertiary road.
Legal position
In the United Kingdom, 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).
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.
The road
In rural areas such roads can often be 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 rights of way.
Off road vehicles causing damage In many rural areas, these roads are popular with bikers and users of four wheel drive and other off-road vehicles - both of which can cause considerable damage to the unmetalled surface - as a results some such roads have been closed to powered vehicles by the local council responsible for road maintenance.
Nature and history of Byeways
One of the most obvious features of a road is its direction; related to this is how straight or sinuous the byway. In the United Kingdom, straight lines are rarely seen in the landscape, and straight roads are equally rare; where they do occur they are usually either Roman roads or related to later land enclosure.
As Messrs Sellar & Yeatman said in "1066 and All That", ‘...the Roman roads ran absolutely straight in all directions and all led to Rome’! In fact Roman roads can be better described as being ‘direct’, and usually proceed in a series of straight lines from one Roman settlement to another. Many Roman roads are marked as such on Ordnance Survey maps. Image produced from the Ordnance Survey Get-a-map service. ...
Some byways that have not been over modernised still retain traces of the aggers (or ditches), that originally ran along each side of the lane; good examples ofthis 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. Such roads can often be seen to bend and change width at the parish boundary and as such reflecting the work of the two different surveyors who had each built a road from a village to its boundary. If the roads did not meet up exactly,as they were wont to do, a double-90° bend might result.
Many British byways are sinuous, as the poet GK Chesterton famously said:
- The rolling English drunkard made the rolling English road,
- A reeling road, a rolling road, that rambles round the shire . . .
- A merry road, a mazy road, and such as we did tread
- The night we went to Birmingham by way of Beachy Head.
Other types of rights of way (UK) | 
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