[cogman10]

It's a little more tricky than that. There are implicit public easements that get created merely by a path being open and commonly used. That's pretty close to the right in the UK.

If you can show that you've been using a specific path for years the owner of that path can lose rights to block access. This is why you see some land owners putting up no-trespassing signs and jealously guarding their land and access. They don't want to lose the ability to effectively control their paths. IIRC, this is a common law thing. It's a bit like trademarks in the sense that land owners need to guard their land otherwise they lose a chunk of it.

The squishiness here is I don't think there's a specified amount of time before the public easement is granted.