About and contact
Updated 24 October 2026
Can I Walk Here? answers the question walkers ask before they set off: am I allowed on this land? England has more than 6,000 registered commons and a great deal of other open access land, but the official answer sits in map layers and legal terms that are hard to read on a phone at a field gate. Each page here takes one common, says plainly what the official maps show, and sets out the rules for dogs and what your access covers.
Who runs it
The site is run independently by George. It is not part of Natural England, any council, the National Trust or any landowner.
How the answers are made
Every answer about access comes from Natural England's open data, with the version and date of each map shown on the page:
- Registered common land. Natural England's map of conclusive registered common land gives each common's name, register unit and boundary. Sizes are measured from those boundaries.
- Open access land. Natural England's access map shows where the right to roam applies: open country, registered common land and land dedicated for public access. We measure how much of each common it covers.
- Section 15 land. Some commons had public access before the right to roam, under another law such as section 193 of the Law of Property Act 1925, the National Trust Acts or a local Act. The right to roam's own rules, such as the dog lead season, do not apply there by law, so those pages name the law that does.
- Coastal margin. Land next to the King Charles III England Coast Path has its own access rules and dog rules, and pages near the coast say so.
- Parishes. Each common is placed in the parish that holds most of it, using Office for National Statistics boundaries, so a common whose register name mentions another place still lands in the right parish.
What the maps can't tell you: whether a gate is open today, where the paths run, whether some land inside a common stays private (buildings, gardens, crops), or whether the land is closed or restricted for a time. Every page links the place to check closures before you go. Notes on what a walk is like (views, ground underfoot, parking) come from named sources such as the National Trust and the councils that manage the land, rewritten plainly and credited on the page. They never decide whether you can walk somewhere.
The sources page lists every dataset, its licence and how it is used.
How often it is checked
Natural England publishes new versions of its maps a few times a year. Each page is rebuilt from the latest version, and its "Data changed" date moves only when something it says has changed. The "Data checked" date shows the last check against the sources, at least monthly.
Corrections
If an answer looks wrong, or you know a place and something is missing, email hello@caniwalkhere.co.uk with the page and what you found. It will be checked against the source, normally within two days, and corrected; the page's "Data changed" date shows when. Notes about a walk are credited if you would like.
Independence
The site takes no fees from landowners, councils or anyone else, and it carries no advertising.
Contact
Email: hello@caniwalkhere.co.uk