Another bit of online reading;
https://historicengland.org.uk/listing/the-list/list-entry/1000881After visiting Garnons earlier in the year, Repton produced a Red Book in July 1791. The grounds had already seen some improvement, and Repton mentions recently made walks west of the house. For the park he proposed to create the appearance of uninterrupted unity of domain. That was to be achieved by moving the turnpike road which passed c 150m in front of the house to a new line outside the park c 400m to the south. A new entrance was to be contrived and plantation screens and clumps introduced both to hide unwanted views and to enhance others.
Those walks west of the house seem to fit into the pattern of other paths beyond the boundaries of the park and would point towards a need created by the moving of the road.
The current view from Google Earth shows the back drive is no more and the Lodge house as a separate property from the parkland, it would have been possible to put a footpath in along field boundaries, with out any hindrance to the farming of the land, but despite HC mentioning landowners 'giving more than they take', this might be a 'give' a bit to close to home.
I have to admit to knowing about the Corruption of the Definitive map around Garnons long before I started this topic. In fact that Harry Cotterell became President of the CLA around the time I was first asked to join a Local Access Forum and I had access to the CLA's monthly magazine, I checked out Garnons and found an area around the estate stripped of RoWs, I thought that is just 'par for the course'. Coming back to this X zone has been quite a learning curve, shame it has not given HC some insight into lostways.
An area of 1940 acres without public access, equivalent to nearly 8 km grid squares. Yet another example of a phenomenon of which there are many examples across the country. I could not get particularly interested as I was concentrating on my home counties problems and the old maps would be 50/ 60 miles away in the Hereford County Archives. Why bother, the Wye Way manages to squeeze itself under the southern boundary of HC's privacy zone. Actually I may be slightly inaccurate there; Sir John Cotterell may be the actual landowner, though reading Marion Shoard's book 'This Land is our Land', which examines the pattern of ownership of rural land in the UK, I would guess that actual ownership is more disguised and protected against inheritance tax. HC would seem to have an elder brother, who stands to inherit the Baronetcy, this may be why HC likes to describe himself as more of a Farmer than a landowner. This was written in the blurb about him when he became President of the CLA, but even being the younger sibling does not mean that he is not aware of the history of the estate circa 1949 onward during the compilation of the DM.
Coming from a farming background, those who own land tend to treat me as if I fall in with their way of thinking, so the knowledge that the DM was corrupted in my area is still referred to with some relish, by those who think it clever to have 'got one over' on the intentions of the 1949 Act. For the scale of this difference between old maps and those RoWs, which should have been shown as they are elsewhere, to have been left off must be woven into local folk lore, you would just need to be in a particular strata of society to hear about it.
However thanks to Fernman's help earlier in this topic I now can access old maps sitting at my PC. Click on this link;
http://maps.nls.uk/view/101569740and the National Library of Scotland will provide instant access to the 1903 OS map. The residual grey paths recorded on the Explorer map don't fully make sense until they are compared with the pattern of access shown by the actual maps closer in time to the original surveys. In my last post I refer to the path being a byepass, add to this the tributary paths which join way, this adds up to "Strength of Way" that rather alters the description of 'shortcuts of yesteryear'.
Bringing back this image from the last page, does the the red deviation off the front drive to Garnons and the spur Ron has noticed indicate a much stronger pedestrian traffic Byepassing Garnons than merely local shortcuts.
Where is this traffic going to and coming from?
Does this give us a hint? This section of map is taken from the 1886 map, which does not show a bridge at Bridge Sollers. The link to the later map 1905 above does show the bridge. Now a bridge crossing of a major river outside of an urban area must be an important feature in the access map for the 21st century, a redundant ferry not important but could access to historical ford crossing be of value to the equestrian tourism industry. Also valuable entry/exit points for canoeists.