Common land in England: what it is and who owns it
Common land in England is not public land, and it is not unowned. What it actually is, who holds rights over it, and how to find it on a map.
There's a stretch of moorland above a village in Cornwall that anyone can walk across, but nobody fully owns in the way they own a house. The farmer next door grazes sheep on it in summer. A handful of local families have cut bracken there for generations. Walkers cross it every weekend. And if you look up who holds the freehold, you'll find a name, but that name doesn't tell you the whole story, because common land never does.
Common land is one of the more misunderstood parts of the English and Welsh landscape. People assume it's public land. Some assume it's ownerless. It's usually neither. Here's what it actually is, who has rights over it, and how to find it.
What common land actually is
The starting point: most common land is privately owned. The land belongs to someone, typically the lord of the manor historically, though the freehold may now sit with a landowner of any kind. What makes it "common" is not a lack of ownership. It's a set of rights that other people hold over it.
These rights are called rights of common. They're old, specific, and legally recognised. The main ones are:
Pasture: the right to graze specified livestock. A commoner with rights of pasture might be entitled to graze a certain number of sheep or cattle on the land.
Estovers: the right to take wood, reeds, or bracken for domestic use. Not timber from mature trees, but material for fuel or repair.
Turbary: the right to cut turf or peat for fuel. Still exercised in a few places.
Piscary: the right to take fish from any water on the land.
Pannage: the right to put pigs out to forage on acorns and beechmast. In the New Forest, this still happens every autumn.
These rights attach to specific land, not to individuals generally. The people entitled to exercise them are called commoners, and their entitlement usually derives from owning or occupying particular nearby land, or from an old custom that has survived long enough to be legally recognised.
The result is a form of property that doesn't fit neatly into modern thinking. The landowner owns the freehold. The commoners hold rights over it. Neither can simply do whatever they like with it.
The registration system
England and Wales have a registration system for common land, created by the Commons Registration Act 1965 and substantially updated by the Commons Act 2006. Local registration authorities, which are county councils, unitary councils, and London borough councils, maintain the registers. If a piece of land is on the register, it is common land in law.
The 1965 Act required all common land and all town and village greens to be registered. Registration was largely completed between 1967 and 1970. Land that was not registered by the deadline generally ceased to be recognised as common, though this has been contested in various cases over the years. The Commons Act 2006 brought in a new procedure for amending the registers and introduced some flexibility for resolving historic mistakes and omissions.
Town and village greens are registered in the same system but are a distinct category. A green typically sits in a settlement and has been used by local inhabitants for lawful sports and pastimes over a long period. Many are small, central to a village, and surrounded by development. Common land tends to be bigger and more rural, though the boundary between the categories can blur, and both sit in the same statutory register.
What you can and cannot do on common land
If land is registered common land in England, the Countryside and Rights of Way Act 2000 (the CRoW Act) gives every member of the public the right to access it on foot. This has applied throughout England since 28 May 2005. The same right extends to mapped open country: mountain, moor, heath, and down. A registered common in England is, in practice, somewhere you're free to walk.
Wales has its own access arrangements and its own commons, with broadly similar principles.
What you cannot do is treat common land as yours to build on, fence off, or enclose. The Commons Act 2006, section 38, prohibits carrying out restricted works on common land without the consent of the appropriate national authority: the Secretary of State in England, Welsh Ministers in Wales. Restricted works include buildings, fences, walls, ditches, drains, and hard surfacing, basically anything that would prevent or impede access. This is the practical barrier to enclosure. The historic Inclosure Acts of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries swept away enormous areas of common land; what remains is protected, and getting consent to work on it is not a straightforward matter.
So common land sits in a particular position in the landscape: privately owned, publicly accessible, and encumbered with a set of rights that neither the owner nor anyone else can simply override.
Common land and the gaps on the map
Here is where this gets interesting for anyone who spends time looking at land maps.
The INSPIRE Index Polygons dataset shows every registered freehold in England and Wales as a polygon drawn over the land it covers. But common land, being held in a different way and registered under a different statutory system, does not always appear in that dataset the way a conventional freehold does. The commons register and the land register are separate things. Some common land appears in HM Land Registry's title register with an appropriate note, but the nature of the rights and the registration route is different.
The result: common land can appear as a gap in the INSPIRE layer, or as a boundary that doesn't match the terrain. When you're looking at a map and trying to understand why a particular patch has no polygon over it, or why the polygons nearby have strange edges, common land is one of the things worth checking.
This is distinct from genuinely unregistered land, which is land where no freehold has ever been registered with HM Land Registry. As the piece on unregistered land and what it means to be unowned explains, absence from the register doesn't mean nobody has a claim. Common land illustrates the same point from a different angle: it can have its own title registered, or sit unregistered, or somewhere in between, and in all cases somebody has interests in it. A gap on the freehold map is not automatically a gap in anyone's rights.
How to find common land on a map
The most practical starting point for England is the MAGIC map, run by Defra: magic.defra.gov.uk. Turn on the Access layer and you'll see registered common land overlaid on the base map. The data was digitised from the local authority registers and, while it isn't updated in real time, it covers the great majority of registered common land and gives you a quick visual read on whether a piece of land falls within the registered commons.
Natural England also publishes an open access map at openaccess.naturalengland.org.uk, which shows both mapped open country and registered common land. This is useful if you want to understand where the public access rights under the CRoW Act apply.
For the authoritative record, the commons registers held by local registration authorities are the statutory source of truth. They're searchable at your local county or unitary council, and many are now available online. If you're researching a specific piece of land and want to know whether it's registered common land, who holds rights of common over it, or what those rights are, the local register is where you go. A solicitor who works in property will be able to help you interpret what you find.
If you're doing the broader desk research first, how to research land in the UK before you visit covers the full toolkit, of which the commons layer is one element among several.
Common land is not the frontier
The claiming fantasy that drives a lot of interest in unregistered land does not apply to common land. Because it's registered under its own system, because it's privately owned with recognised commoners' rights attached, and because the access and works-consent rules protect it, common land is not a candidate for adverse possession in the way an unregistered patch of scrub might be. You can't fence it without ministerial consent. You can't occupy it to the exclusion of everyone else, because the commoners' rights and the public access rights mean your "exclusive" possession would be contested from day one.
The gap worth looking for, the unregistered parcel where no registered owner gets a notification letter and the 12-year clock can run quietly, is a different kind of land. Common land is worth understanding precisely because it can look, on the map, a bit like that kind of land. Knowing the difference saves a lot of wasted attention.
Finding the actual gaps
Edgelands maps every registered freehold in England and Wales using the INSPIRE polygon dataset, and leaves the gaps visible. Some of those gaps are common land. Some are highways. Some are watercourses. And some are genuinely unregistered parcels where no freehold has ever been registered, which is the raw material for everything the adverse possession posts on this blog describe.
The tool shows you the shape of the registered freehold layer and where it ends. It doesn't tell you the legal character of what's in the gaps, because that depends on the type of land in question, and working that out is the research. For common land, that research runs through the MAGIC map and the local commons register. For genuinely unregistered parcels, it runs through an HM Land Registry title search and, in time, a property solicitor.
Edgelands is a research tool for finding and mapping unregistered land: it shows you where the registered freehold layer ends, which is the part that's hard to see any other way. Making sense of what you've found is the next step, and that's where the layers of the landscape start to matter. £5 a month, 7-day free trial.
Find the gap. Then work out what kind of gap it is. Then talk to someone who does this for a living.
FAQ
What is common land? Land registered as common under the Commons Registration Act 1965 and the Commons Act 2006, over which other people hold rights of common such as grazing. It is a specific legal status recorded on a register, not a description of any land that happens to feel open.
Who owns common land? Somebody does, almost always privately. Common land has an owner, and the "common" part refers to the rights other people hold over it rather than to public ownership. It is neither public land nor unowned land, which is the single most common misunderstanding about it.
Can you walk on common land? In England, yes, on registered common land. The Countryside and Rights of Way Act 2000 gave the public a right of access on foot to registered commons, in force since 28 May 2005. That is a right to walk, not a right to do as you please.
Can you build on or fence off common land? No, not without consent. Section 38 of the Commons Act 2006 prohibits restricted works, which includes buildings, fences, walls and hard surfacing, without the consent of the Secretary of State in England or the Welsh Ministers in Wales.
How do you find out if land is common land? Check the commons register held by the commons registration authority for the area, which is the county, unitary or London borough council. The MAGIC map also carries a registered common land layer if you want to look before you enquire.