@midgebabe
Walking rights of way is not a problem.
People not waking the rights of way but using them as excuses to cause damage is the problem
If there were more routes, it could spread the load and reduce damage
I had a long thread a couple of years ago about similar issues.
One of the main problems we have is a wood on our farm. Its a long narrow wood with a footpath right through the middle at the narrowest part. It's a short path no more than 500m and it goes nowhere. It literally goes to the wood wall and stops, there used be a building there that it served and now there isn't.
We have miles and miles of footpaths on our farm that are brilliant circular routes, we also have a major 'national' footpath that many of these routes also connect to. Despite this most people still choose to use this short footpath in our wood that goes nowhere.
At any given time of day we can go past the wood and there are people in there, at this time of year it's mostly dog walkers, the wood has very secure boundaries and it seems to have attracted a certain type of dog owner. They are rarely anywhere near the footpath and never have dogs on leads.
People have also come in and made dens, put up rope swings, nailed bird boxes up and someone has hung squirrel feeders throughout the wood. In autumn people come and pick all the berries. In winter people come with massive carrier bags to pick up pine ones, holly, take fir cuttings. We regularly see people taking 'firewood'. All of this is basically trespass , often theft and in the case of stuff nailed to trees, criminal damage.
We don't want to be the fun police so we generally don't get arsey about this stuff but people never ask. Ever. The local community seem to see it as 'their' wood and regularly complain on facebook when we put cattle in.
If they did ask we would tell them that we don't want the squirrels encouraging because they eat little birds eggs. We don't want them to take the berries because we want them leaving for the birds. We don't want rope swings/ dens etc not because we are mean but because we put native cattle in the wood throughout the year to graze it off for conservation purposes and children and cattle don't mix. The dog walkers would also be told that we don't want dog crap everywhere because it is a risk to the cattle and their dogs are disturbing the wildlife in the wood, and ... dogs and cattle don't mix.
It's a working environment, but also an environment we are trying to actively manage for conservation purposes and every person that goes in and goes off the footpath and let's dogs run around sets that back a little more.
The problem isn't a lack of paths it's generations of people who have grown up to believe they have absolute right to go wherever they please do whatever they please and take anything they want from the countryside.