The footpath capital of Britain: public rights of way per square mile by council area in England and Wales: data and code

Which part of Britain has the most public footpaths, bridleways and byways for every square mile of land? This record holds the data and code behind an interactive map and league table of every council area (local authority district) in England and Wales, measured from the councils' own rights of way open data (149 highway authorities, collected by rowmaps.com) and checked against OpenStreetMap (ohsome API, 2016 to 2026). England and Wales have 139,409 miles of public rights of way in the council data, 2.4 miles per square mile. Rossendale has the most, 7.7 miles per square mile, and nine of the top ten councils are South Pennine districts either side of the Lancashire and Yorkshire border. Per mile of road, Powys leads, then Malvern Hills, Rossendale and Ribble Valley; per resident, Powys leads by far. Ribble Valley is 64th per square mile but 4th per mile of road and 10th per resident. OpenStreetMap holds 57% of the council length, up from about 20% in 2016. Inner London boroughs have no definitive map; Scotland and Northern Ireland have no comparable rights of way system and are not ranked. Interactive version: https://tristan-hotham.github.io/footpaths/ AI use: written with drafting, data and coding help from Claude (Anthropic).