What is an accommodation road?

Answer 1

An accommodation road is one that is lawfully necessary for someone to access land or other property they have the right to use - for example - one farmer may need an accommodation road across another farmer's land in order to for him and his assigns to take animals to a watering place that he is lawfully entitled to use.

Often it is used in common by the farmer on whose land it lies and one or more other farmers who have rights to use the same watering place. In ancient Wales, for example, the Laws of Hywel Dda required all habitations to have a path to a church and another to a watering place, plus a roadway at least 7 feet wide to the common land of the tref or township to which the habitation was attached, and all such townships were to have roads across and along them (classic Celtic cross), and all the Kings Highways had to be maintained 12 feet wide at the very least. Any or all of these ways may have been someone's accommodation road or roads, so the term accommodation road should never be assumed to mean the way is a Kings Highway bearing a right of way to accommodate all subjects under the Crown. Indeed, there are many 'public highways' that are also 'private accommodation roads', and which if 'stopped up' as 'public highways' by a statutory mechanism, such as the Highways Acts of the United Kingdom provide, it does not have the effect of stopping up the private accommodation road status, otherwise it would deny the right of the beneficiary to, for example, take his animals to the watering place, to slake their thirsts. It is therefore best to think of an accommodation road as pre-existing any rights the public have acquired to use it, and such public rights having been acquired by members of the public other than the people that benefit from the private right, so if the public rights cease, the private rights continue.