Curious about legal aspects of right-of-way

Near our home there's a field that locals use to access the forest. It's a small piece of land, quite overgrown, wall broken. No sign anyone has used it for decades. Nobody I spoke to knows anything about the legal position of this land as a right-of-way, nor who owns it. Thinking about it I got curious about the legal position. What would be involved in finding out the official status of the land and formally establishing a right-of-way (vs someday the owner shows up and puts a fence around it)?
I suppose a local farmer might have some idea of ownership, but otherwise what kind of cost would be involved to get a solicitor to look into the current status?
Related thoughts:
- if a landowner dies without (known) decscendants, does the land revert to the state or does it sit in limbo indefinitely in case someone turns up to make a claim?
- if land reverts to the state, does that make it "public land" and therefore freely accessible by the public?
- what if a landowner dies and - for example - the land passes to relative abroad, the relative doesn't care about it, and a generation or two later it's largely forgotten by the descendants? I guess this land is still officially "owned" by someone... or not?

Have you checked on www.landdirect.ie?

@Protocol - at your advice I did now. I can see the land in question is commonage... not sure how to interpret that. Incidentally, while most houses of locals nearby are freehold, a couple are commonage, and it says a few are not on the land registry (but in the registry of deeds).

patfert1 said:

if land reverts to the state, does that make it "public land" and therefore freely accessible by the public?

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No. land in public ownership is not automatically open to the public. The state as a landowner has the same rights as any other landowner, including the right to control access to the land it owns.

patfert1 said:

I can see the land in question is commonage.

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Commonage is usually land that is jointly owned by landowners in the area. Prior to land purchase, a lot of estates were managed on the basis that

• the better land was let to tenants to farm individuallly; and each tenant had a particular lot or a number of lots that was his
• poorer land was available to the same tenants to graze livestock (usually sheep) on, but no tenant had a particular lot that was just for his lifestock — there was just grazing land, and each tenant had a right to put so many head of sheep on it.

When land purchase came along, each tenant became the owner of his own farm, plus he became a part-owner of the sheep-grazing land — the "commonage", because it was owned and used in common by all the owners of farms on the former estate.

The owners of commonage have the right to control access to it and they can collectively agree to fence it, close it off, whatever. But they are very unlikely to bother unless the use the public are making of it causes them a problem.

@TomEdison Thanks!