Had an odd experience last week. Was out mapping a bridleway with my usual exploring buddy. It was quite late at night / early in the morning and pretty quiet. There was no moon but we were well illuminated by our bicycle lights. Late night is often a nice time to ramble through the bridleways in the cool and quiet, without running into anybody else.

We followed the bridleway signs up to a farm. The path had led us to a smart wooden gate that looked like it opened into somebody's garden - we decided not to go through there for reasons of politeness and that the sensible thing was to continue round the track at the edge of the field; with British rights of way this is almost always the right approach and you find another signpost shortly after. The route markers often assume a certain degree of ESP like that.

We carried on round the field and the track seemed to take us into the farmyard / farm shop area. There was a clearly marked "Way out" sign, suggesting this area was open to the public and we decided it would be best to just head through that in order to get back on the road, whilst keeping an eye out for any more bridleway signs. Plenty of local bridleways do go down farm access roads in order to get to the fields, so this would not be an unusual situation.

At that point a chap with a shotgun stepped out of a doorway and demanded to know what we were doing there... Ooops! I guess that wasn't part of the bridleway after all! We weren't thrilled by the presence of the shotgun (note to readers outside the UK: it's very rare to see a gun around these parts, especially in the hands of a civilian!) but it seemed to be there mainly for show and he kept it lowered at all times. He did mention that he'd considered letting the dogs out (!) but had decided they'd make too much noise (?). Again, that comment may well have been for show. Apparently they'd had some problems with theft.

He told us that the final (signposted) section of bridleway that had led us to the farm was not a right of way and that the local farmer had moved the bridleway so horses wouldn't exit onto the roadway there - apparently we should have gone across an earlier field (unsignposted) instead. He initially seemed skeptical that we'd followed a sign at all but eventually vaguely seemed to remember what we were referring to. He kindly allowed us to exit down the farm's access road, which was our most direct route back to the main highway and there was no further fuss.

We were able to find the exit of the bridleway he had pointed to; it was a permissive path, so not the right of way we originally started on. I subsequently joined up that exit with the bridleway we'd come from using Landsat imagery to follow the edge of the field. I also marked the "suspect" path that led us up to the farm, but tagged it as "Private", with a note attached to the way explaining the situation. Hopefully this'll prevent others from alarming the residents! For now, I think that's the best solution for the main map.

The question remains of where the true right-of-way actually belonged, if it had been correctly "stopped up" by the local authority (although it's not clear why the sign would still be there, in that case), or if its use is merely "discouraged" by the landowner.

It was a somewhat unsettling experience, even though there was no real danger. It was also very atypical as many many previous late night / early morning expeditions have gone entirely without incident. I'm pretty glad it's unusual, though!