Filled in your survey, Ella, a couple of days ago. Little difficult to see the purpose from the questions asked but some points that might be helpful.Having served on a Local Access Forum, the access network in many counties is prioritized on level of use; A - B and C. The A stream obviously gets the prime investment, and the C stream is pretty well ignored.
Kissing gates, a fave of my wife and I are the top of tree, in walk furniture parlance, in the minds of the local authorities and their commitment to equal opportunities tends to put the additional cost of the wider variety, which allows wheelchair access, as a budgetry quandary.
Personally the stile I love to find are those pieces of historical evidence, probably in the C stream or those lost ways that connect to these lesser used routes that prove an old way. Sometimes a well preserved antique wicket or wrought iron kissing gate, so deeply embedded in a hedge that there is no chance of using it. It does so often show that the countryside community of 1819 did not run on one man, his dog and a combine harvester as the landowner of 2019 would like us to think.
There is another sorts, one is the Hunting Wicket, doubt any are actually on rights of way, but they do create access access through holding boundaries. Do I hear a gate is not a stile, well the propensity of local authorities to replace stiles with kissing gates might lead us all to some confusion.
Another is the the Fence; this you will find under a mature Oak, spreading Chestnut or other. So often the ways created in the past were driven by changing times and new needs, a holding boundary will not have a field gate. Hedges rarely grow under the canopy of a tree, so the fence that stock proofs this gap became a stile. The tree survives, the way does not get on the Definitive Map, who might use it............
