A New Walking Paradigm
I've been raving to fellow walkers for a while now about how a combination of new facilities on the web and my new GPS have changed the way I plan and do walks.
It's perhaps worth looking back to how I used to operate. Rule number one was: never use anything less than Ordnance Survey (OS) 1:25,000 series maps. Those used to be expensive in the days of the little green covered maps but now these have been replaced by bigger orange covered ones which are better value, and indeed I have the three for the area around where we live.
The reason you needed to use 1:25,000 series was two fold. First it really let you look at the route of footpaths carefully, especially around buildings which in my experience was often where trouble lurked and when walking having the field boundaries made it a simple matter of "pilotage" rather than true navigation.
On the 1:50,000 maps you simply don't have that level of detail: field boundaries aren't shown and it was easy to get confused on seldom walked paths.
But most importantly of all the 1:25,000 gave you confidence on those seldom walked paths that you weren't trespassing but were on the right track.
So what's changed?
Well mapping has really come to the Web now and after toying with various online tools I'm now using my own. You can find it here. It's based on the MultiMap Open API and it lets me fly around 1:50,000 scale OS maps in a Google Maps like manner by dragging them with my mouse.
Having found a potential route the next thing is to look at its viability and that's where Google Maps comes in. Now sadly they don't use OS maps but they do offer "satellite" photography and around here that means high resolution aerial photography so I open that up on my other monitor1 and look at them side by side. The photography provides an excellent means of looking at the route in detail. So you can follow a footpath's route and see if it keeps to field edges (generally speaking a good thing) or goes across a field. If it does cross a field you can look for wear marks on the ground. If they're strongly shown you're probably safe to include it in your walk. If there's little or no sign of a path this is one worth avoiding.
Similarly for sections on road, which you're aiming to keep to a minimum, you can see whether or not there's a pavement.
The aerial view also lets you assess how hard it will be to negotiate a route through buildings. On a walk we did recently there's a section in Langley where you have to thread your way through between some new houses to find the footpath. You can see how that looks here and I looked at that bit carefully before we set out so I had it fixed in my mind. A good choice as it wasn't well way marked but I was confident of my route because I'd assessed it beforehand2.
So now I've got a route picked out and I can even print off the 1:50,000 maps I need. As these are just printed copies I'm happy to write on them and make any notes I want from what I've seen on Google Maps aerial photography. It's not unusual for me to draw in extra features which aren't on the map.
The final step is the get the route into my GPS. My software lets you mark the way points for your route on Google Maps. That gives me a .GPX file which I save on my PC and then upload to my GPS.
When we get to the start of the walk I tell the GPS which route we're following and it then tells me where to go. It automatically switches to the next way point as we pass the current one and even copes with us missing way points if we make small diversions from our route.
My GPS is now wrist mounted like a huge watch so I can simply glance at my wrist and if I have the right display screen active it points in the direction we should be walking and also gives me the distance to the next way point.
In truth I've normally got the route pretty firmly in my head having looked at it on both the OS map and aerial photography but the GPS provides easy reassurance that we're going the right way.
- I've got a "dual headed" desktop PC with two 1600x1200 LCD screens and I wonder now how I ever coped with just one!
- In fact it was a bit spooky seeing it for real having only seen it from the air first.