I’m ashamed to admin that’s why I knew. :smack:
It’s also probably the case that in a country the size of the UK there might be, as a matter of necessity, a strong public interest to allow traversing of most private lands in most situations. The UK is much smaller than the United States, and I’m assuming its lands are mostly privately held these days.
In the United States, over 440m acres of land is public lands, over seven times the size of the entire United Kingdom–and that doesn’t include the large amount of private ranches, timbering areas and etc that the private property owners allow the public to use recreationally.
One of the most popular locations near where I live for people to go hiking and to have picnics and (amongst teenagers and college kids) parties in the woods was long assumed by many to be some form of public land. It was actually completely neglected land owned by a timber company, and that only became known when a kid drowned on the land and that caused them to become more concerned about how it was being used.
And apart from the large swaths of public land designated as BLM or Forest Service land, there are a large number of county / state / regional parks. Once, out of curiosity, I totalled up a bunch of the hiking venues I consider reasonably “local” from where I am in the South Bay, and came up with 270,000 acres, 1100 miles of designated trail. None of this is NFS/BLM land - it is around 60 various parks / open space preserves under a number of authorities, in sizes ranging from tiny to pretty large (Henry Coe is over 80,000 of those acres). Most of these parks became “public” higgledy-piggledy as old land holdings such as ranches were donated / sold cheaply by heirs who no longer had any use for the property. With this sort of patchwork, MANY easements have been negotiated between parks, allowing you to get between them. For instance, Portola and Big Basin state parks are connected by a 1.5 mile easement trail across land belonging to “Redtree Properties”.