Photo: Surveying a route in the Scottish Borders © Stephanie Droop

Purpose of the role

ScotWays maintains the National Catalogue of Rights of Way (CROW) which helps local authorities and ourselves uphold public access rights, and Heritage Paths, a unique, free online collection of historic routes including route descriptions and heritage interpretation.

When the resurveying project launches in Summer 2026, your role will be to travel some of these routes, take photographs and record details about them, and to report your findings so that we can update our records.

About the project

In Summer 2026, we will be launching a new project to resurvey the rights of way and other routes recorded in CROW, and our Heritage Paths, at a much greater rate than we have done recently. This will build on the surveys of the routes in Scottish Hill Tracks which were surveyed by volunteers between 2020-2023. The routes are extremely varied:

• in length: from less than 1 km to over 20 km.
• in setting: including urban short-cuts and vennels, field-margin paths in farmland, paths through woodland, and historic routes through the mountains, some of which are trackless.
• in level of usage: from well-loved routes that see thousands of users per year, to others that may have fallen into disuse.
• in condition: from lit, paved and signposted routes, to overgrown routes with windfall, fences and mud.
• In land use: some rights of way may go through farm steadings, industrial areas or other land to which statutory access rights don’t apply.

Planned timeline:

• November 2025 – March 2026: Piloting route surveys
• March – June 2026: Developing systems and guidance for volunteers
• April 2026: Recruitment of volunteers
• July 2026: Offering routes to registered volunteers

How to get involved

If this sounds like something you would like to get involved in, please sign up to our e-newsletter using the form below, through which we will advertise when we’re ready to recruit volunteers.