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The future of a contested public footpath in Cwmfelinfach could be confirmed after walkers said they had used the route for years.

Members of Caerphilly County Borough Council’s rights of way cabinet committee voted unanimously, on Tuesday October 15, to recommend the route be added to the official record.

The contested path in question runs past the former Ynys Hywel activity centre, which is now a children’s home.

The current owners bought the site in 2023, three years after a previous owner obstructed public access to the path, the committee heard.

But in written statements, dozens of residents said they had walked the route for many years before that, without using force to enter the route or being told they could not walk across the land.

Local man Norman Liversuch said he had used the path when he was growing up in Cwmfelinfach in the 1950s and 1960s.

Speaking at the meeting, he said the first time the route was blocked was in “early 2020”.

Under rights of way laws, “where a way had been used for 20 years or more, it was deemed to have been dedicated as a highway”, council officer Stefan Denbury wrote in a report to the committee.

Ynysddu ward councillors Jan Jones and Janine Reed also spoke in support of the walkers.

Cllr Reed said she used to attend events at Ynys Hywel and could remember groups of young people using the contested path.

Cllr Reed said she and her father had walked the route “over and over again” in the past.

Sometimes, they would stop to chat with the then-landowner, who never challenged them about walking the route, she said, adding that more than 50 members of the community had all submitted their own accounts of the path’s historic public use.

Maggie Thomas, who is a correspondent for the Open Spaces Society and a member of the Ramblers Cymru rights of way committee, told the committee there was a “plethora of evidence” the path had been used as a right of way for 20 years.

Also taking part in the meeting was Lucy Evans, the director of Positif Care, which currently owns the Ynys Hywel site.

She told the committee the site now serves as a “residential children’s home” and “there are very vulnerable children living there”.

But Cllr Reed told the committee’s members the “acid test” before them had to be based on evidence “and not on emotive statements”.

Mr Denbury, in his report, also stated the question before the committee is “what public rights exist – not what rights the council, the landowner or the public would like to have”.