Two riders can stand at the exact same gate, looking at the exact same track, and walk away with two completely different, completely confident opinions about whether it's legal to ride a motorcycle through it. Neither of them is being deliberately difficult. They're just looking at two different things that happen to look identical from the saddle: Access Land and a BOAT. Confusing the two is the single biggest source of green laning arguments online, and it's worth twenty minutes to actually understand the difference.
Access Land: open to walkers, never open to motor vehicles
Access Land is the "right to roam" land created by the Countryside and Rights of Way Act 2000, mostly mountain, moor, heath, down and registered common land. Walkers can wander freely across it, off any marked path. In some places, like Dartmoor, horse riders get the same right. It is never open to motor vehicles, on foot or on a bike, full stop, regardless of how worn or track-like a particular line across it looks.
An Open Access Land marker. The walking figure is the whole story, this is access for people on foot, not vehicles. Bob Harvey, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
The confusion happens because Access Land often looks exactly like the kind of ground a green lane crosses, open, unfenced, criss-crossed with lines that look like tracks. Some of those lines are old vehicle ruts from decades ago. Some are just paths worn by feet and hooves. None of that history matters legally. If the land is Access Land and the line across it was never a recorded road, riding it isn't a grey area, it's straightforwardly not allowed, and no amount of "but there's clearly a track here" changes that.
A BOAT or a UCR is a road, just an unsurfaced one
A Byway Open to All Traffic or an Unclassified County Road is a completely different legal thing: a road, recorded on the council's own definitive map, that happens not to be surfaced. Riding one isn't trespass, isn't an abuse of access rights, and isn't a courtesy extended by a landowner. It's using a public road exactly as intended, the same as riding down a tarmac lane, just rougher underneath you.
A Byway Open to All Traffic sign. Unlike Access Land, this is a legal road, motor vehicles included. Bongo50, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
Signage like this is the clearest tell when it exists, but plenty of genuine BOATs and UCRs have no fingerpost at all, just a gate and two wheel ruts heading off across open country. That's exactly why eyeballing a track has never been a reliable way to judge it, and why checking a route's actual recorded status matters more than how confident either side of an argument sounds.
Why this exact confusion keeps blowing up online
Post a good day's riding from somewhere like Dartmoor and you'll reliably get one side insisting it's a disgrace on Access Land, and the other insisting it's a perfectly legal byway, both stated as flat fact. We went through this properly for Dartmoor and Exmoor specifically, and the honest answer is that both sides are sometimes right, just about different tracks a few hundred metres apart that happen to look the same from a photo. That's not a satisfying answer for an argument, but it's the correct one.
"I've had this argument from both directions. Someone convinced a legal byway is trespass because it crosses open moorland, and someone convinced a line across Access Land must be fine because it's clearly been driven before. They're both making the same mistake, judging it by what the ground looks like instead of what it's actually recorded as."
- Mat Stuckey, founder of Holloway
How to actually tell the difference before you ride
- Look for a fingerpost. "Byway Open to All Traffic" or "BOAT" means a legal road. A plain public footpath or bridleway sign, or an Access Land waymark, means it isn't.
- Don't trust the ground itself. A worn line, an obvious track, even old tyre ruts, none of it proves current legal status either way.
- Check the actual record. Holloway's map shows every lane's real legal type, and a Legal Status Search on top of that for anything you're still unsure about.
- When genuinely in doubt, don't ride it. The two consequences, a real trespass issue versus missing out on a ride that was legal all along, are not remotely equal.
Holloway is a free green lane finder, BOAT map and route navigation tool for England and Wales. Every lane's legal type, its difficulty, hazards and a Legal Status Search are free to check, no account needed, precisely because this is the one thing worth getting right before you ride anywhere new.