If you've ridden a legal green lane in England or Wales in the last few decades, there's a fair chance the Trail Riders Fellowship had some hand in keeping that route open. It's not a riding club in the usual sense, and understanding what it actually does helps explain why so many experienced green laners consider membership close to essential, even if they rarely turn up to a group ride.
What the TRF actually does
The Trail Riders Fellowship was founded in 1970, making it one of the longest-running organisations in UK motorcycling, and its core purpose has stayed consistent since: protecting and promoting legal access to the green lane network for motorcyclists in England and Wales.
In practice, that covers a fair amount of ground. The TRF engages directly with local authorities and landowners on route management, contests Traffic Regulation Orders where a closure looks unjustified, carries out route condition surveys to flag maintenance issues before they become a reason for closure, and takes part in legal challenges where access rights are disputed. It also does less visible but equally important work gathering historical evidence to support unrecorded rights of way claims, the kind of work that matters directly to the Section 53 process we've covered separately: read our explainer on Section 53 and the extended deadline.
The organisation is structured around roughly 41 local groups covering England and Wales, with national membership numbers well past 9,000. Collectively, that network supports access to something in the region of 6,000 miles of green road, a figure that gives some sense of scale to what's actually being protected.
The TRF versus a riding club
A riding club is generally organised around social riding, shared interest in a particular bike or discipline, and events. The TRF does organise group rides through its local groups, and plenty of members do ride together regularly, but that's not the core function.
The TRF exists primarily as an access and advocacy body. Its relationship with a county council's rights of way team, or with a landowner unhappy about erosion on a route crossing their land, is the sort of relationship a typical riding club simply doesn't have and isn't set up to build. That distinction matters because it explains why the TRF's work benefits the whole green laning community, not just its own members.
Why non-members still benefit from the TRF's work
This is worth being honest about. If you've never joined the TRF and never plan to, you're almost certainly still benefiting from its work every time you ride a legal green lane. A route survey that flagged erosion before it triggered a closure, a contested TRO that got overturned, a historic route successfully added to the Definitive Map, none of that requires the rider using the lane afterwards to have paid a subscription.
That's not an argument against joining. It's the opposite. The TRF's capacity to do this work depends directly on subscriptions and volunteer time from members, and a green lane network that gets steadily smaller each year isn't hypothetical, it's the direction of travel without sustained pressure in the other direction.
"Riders who've never had a lane closed under them tend to assume it stays open by default. It doesn't. Someone's usually arguing the case on the other end, and that's mostly TRF volunteers doing it for free."
— Mat Stuckey, founder of Holloway
What membership actually gives you
Beyond supporting the wider access work, TRF membership brings a few concrete things. Third-party insurance cover while trail riding, which many riders find is otherwise hard to source specifically for green lane use. Access to local group knowledge, riders who know the current state and status of routes in their area far better than any single online resource could. Organised group rides, if that's of interest, run at a range of experience levels. And a direct line into the organisation's TRO tracking and access advocacy, useful if you ever want to raise a concern about a specific route.
It's worth pairing that local, on-the-ground knowledge with a tool that shows you legal status and current conditions at a glance. You can check a lane's classification and current status on Holloway's map alongside whatever a local TRF group tells you, since the two sources complement rather than replace each other.
Should you join
If you ride green lanes in England or Wales with any regularity, the honest answer is yes. Not because membership unlocks some essential feature you can't get elsewhere, but because the organisation doing the unglamorous work of keeping routes legally open depends on riders like you supporting it, and the annual cost is modest against what's actually at stake for the network as a whole.
If you ride green lanes rarely, or you're still finding your feet and want to understand the basics first, that's a reasonable reason to hold off briefly. But it's worth revisiting once green laning becomes a regular part of how you ride, because the routes you'll be using by then exist partly because people joined before you did.
Ride informed, and support what keeps the network open
Holloway is a modern, simple tool to find legal green lanes, byways and more across England and Wales, free to browse so you always know where you stand before setting off. For £20 a year, Holloway Premium adds full route planning, road-following connectors between lanes, GPX export, exact coordinates, and live weather, giving you the tools to build a complete day's ride. Pair that with TRF membership and you've covered both sides of green laning properly: knowing where you can legally ride, and supporting the work that keeps it that way.