We're always working on ways to make Holloway better for every rider, whether you're planning your first green lane or your fiftieth. This is the latest round of that work: a proper home for your account, a page for every named lane, national park guides, ready-made GPX routes and clearer warnings where a lane needs extra care. Here's what's new, what it looks like and why we built it.
My Holloway: your account, in one place
Until now, everything that belonged to you, your ridden lanes, your saved routes and your plan, lived in slide-out panels inside the map. My Holloway gives it all a proper home. Sign in and you'll see how many lanes you've ridden, the last few you logged, your saved routes, your home start postcode and which plan you're on, with a big button straight back to the map when you're ready to ride.
My Holloway on a phone. Every tile opens the map straight onto the right panel. Shown with a sample account.
It's also a front door to the rest of the site: GPX Routes, lane pages, national parks, the Bike and Tyre Finder, reviews and the latest blog posts are all a tap away. You can add a profile photo too. It's resized to a small square, stored privately and only ever shown to you. You'll find My Holloway at the top of the map's Menu.
A page for every named green lane
People search for lanes by name, "is Mastiles Lane open?", "how long is Pindale Road?", and until now there was nowhere on Holloway to answer that directly. Green lanes by name changes that, with 864 lane pages so far across 18 counties, and a search that covers every named lane we've mapped in them.
The Green lanes by name hub: search a lane or a village, or browse county by county.
Each lane page leads with the thing you most need to know, its current status. Where a lane is closed, you'll see the order that closed it, who made it and when, not just a red line on a map. There's a one-tap "Check its status now" button that runs the same Legal Status Search as the app, plus the lane's combined length across all its mapped sections, a map of where it runs, which villages it starts and finishes near, and the named lanes around it.
Mastiles Lane in the Yorkshire Dales, closed to motor vehicles, with the order behind it spelled out.
National park guides
A lot of riders plan around a national park rather than a county, so we've built a guide for each park in England and Wales with enough legal lanes to be worth one, 12 so far. Every figure is worked out from the real park boundary: how many lanes inside it are open to motorcycles, how many restricted byways there are, which lanes carry a closure or a seasonal restriction, and the longest open lanes to ride.
Every mapped lane inside the Peak District, colour coded by type, with the longest open lanes numbered.
You'll find them all at rideholloway.com/national-parks, from Dartmoor and the Lake District to Eryri and the North York Moors.
GPX Routes, ready to ride
Not everyone wants to build a route from scratch. GPX Routes is a growing set of ready-made motorcycle routes, 34 across 18 counties so far, each built from real lanes that are currently open and linked by real roads. Every route page shows the total distance, how much of it is on byways, the lanes it uses and a map of the whole loop.
The Pindale Road and Dirtlow Rake Loop in the Peak District, one of the ready-made GPX routes.
Browsing the routes is free. Downloading the GPX file is part of Holloway Premium. Once you're signed in, you can also rate a route out of five, which helps other riders find the good ones.
Clearer warnings where a lane needs extra care
Getting legal status right matters more than anything else we do, so a lot of this round went into making sure a lane is never shown as simply "open" when there's more to it. We've carried on working through council and national park authority orders county by county, most recently East Sussex, Northumberland, Nottinghamshire and Shropshire, and a few new kinds of warning now show up wherever the lane appears.
Some lanes are legal but genuinely dangerous without local knowledge. The Broomway in Essex crosses tidal sands where the tide comes in faster than you can travel, so its page and its details in the app now say so plainly, rather than calling it open like any other byway.
The Broomway in Essex, flagged as a tidal crossing that is dangerous without local guidance.
Other lanes run through live-firing military areas, such as Salisbury Plain, Lulworth and the Cinque Ports Training Area, where the range can close the lane without notice. We've flagged 209 lanes like that so far. A lane whose OpenStreetMap name says it has a Traffic Regulation Order, when we haven't found the order itself, now gets a "check before riding" caution instead of looking open. And seasonal and dated closures now lift by themselves on their end date, so a lane that reopens in spring shows as open without anyone needing to remember to update it.
A proper user guide
The old "How this works" panel had grown vague and hard to follow, so we've written a proper User Guide. It walks through everything from your first sign-in to planning and navigating a full day of linked lanes, with screenshots, in the order you'll actually meet it. Jump to any section, or read it start to finish.
The User Guide, from signing in through to Holloway Premium.
Tell us what to build next
Almost everything here started with a rider telling us what was missing or getting in the way. If you spot a lane that looks wrong, use "Report this lane looks wrong" on any lane's detail card. For anything else, ideas included, email hollowayapp@gmail.com. We read every one.
Holloway is a green lane map, route planner and navigation app for motorcycles across England and Wales. The map, legal status, hazards, lane pages, national park guides and My Holloway are all free with a free account, just an email address, no password and no card. Route planning, GPX downloads, saved routes and live navigation are part of Holloway Premium, £20 a year, with £1 from every membership going toward keeping lanes open.