On the open moorland of Dartmoor, I recently found somebody had added the gps trail of their walk and converted it to a footpath. It wanders around a bit, goes from tor to tor , zig-zagging a bit, in a cut-out circle.
My questions are: On open moorland where there is freedom to walk, shouldn’t paths be “generic paths” or “tracks” instead of “footpaths” (Which to me denote official foot and bridle paths as marked on the OS map)?
Secondly, isn’t this a bit messy to mark every little path on the moor, especially in this meandering way? There are sheep and pony tracks across the moor sometimes every few meters away from each other, to mark every one would have paths more frequent than contours!