I love maps! I take after my dad who would happily read an atlas for pleasure, and my eldest takes after him (and me!). However, it is one thing to love looking at maps it is another thing entirely to understand what they mean and for me, my recent navigation training last year and this weekend, proved to me that my geography GCSE was a loooooong time ago.
Understanding a map, what the various footpaths mean, what certain symbols mean and how to read a six figure grid reference is actually quite freeing when it comes to walking the countryside. To know where you can and can’t go legally actually opens it up.
Of course, I hear you cry, there’s no real need to read a map these days as you can use your GPS or the OS maps app. Yes, absolutely you can, however, there are sometimes when having a back up and being able to read your map is really useful. For example when out on a walk recently the OS app failed me due to signal. I wasn’t even up a hill or anywhere remote, I was less than a km from civilisation. I’ve had similar situations with my car GPS which loves to take me down lanes for which my car is not suited. Also if you are out in the cold, your phone battery will die faster.
My top tips are this:
- Before you head out, plan your route from an OS map, then print off the section you are walking as your back up.
- If you are walking in lowland, generally you will use the orange Explorer range of maps. The purple Landranger maps are for higher ground. They tend to be 1:40000 and the contours feature more. An explorer map is 1:25000.
- Footpaths: on the Explorer maps these are marked in green. Short dashes are for walkers, Bridleways are for walkers and horse riders, and obviously byways may be used by vehicles, bikes, horse riders and pedestrians. Not marked in the OS chart below are National Paths such as the Jurassic Way or Pennine Way. These are a mix of short green dashes or the longer green dashes interspersed every few by a diamond. If you look along the routes of these they will be labelled with the respective National Path. In more urban areas the green dashes are green dots to represent public walkways.
- Permissive pathways are pathways that are allowed to be walked on by the landowner, but this is a private arrangement and therefore can also be withdrawn. These may, therefore, differ from what is indicated on an OS map. These are a series of orange dashes, short for footpaths, longer for bridleways. If a permissive pathway is withdrawn, it may still be featured as accessible on your map (even an app!) so do keep an eye out for any signs that the farmer/landowner may have put up to remove the right of way permanently or, even temporarily due to nesting birds or other event.
- Access land in England is generally displayed on a map with a pale orangey-brown margin outlined around the area. The image below shows that Eyam Moor is open access land, however, there are green areas of woodland surrounding it that are not as they do not have the orangey-brown margin around them. Access land means that, thanks to the CRoW (Countryside and Rights of Way act of 2000) people may walk freely on access land. However, there are restrictions to this: you may walk your dog, you may NOT ride your horse, you may not ride a bike or any motorised vehicle (except mobility vehicles) and you may not camp, you also may not undertake watersports if there are areas of water. You can climb, however. As you can see below, there are also still designated footpaths and, it is obviously preferable to stick to them where you can to lessen your environmental impact on the ground. The solid black lines are field boundaries, these can be marked with walls, trees, hedges or even not at all when you get there!
- Water! Using the map above again, there are several blue lines on the map. The straight ones that create squares are your grid references, however the wiggly ones are water courses, streams, rivers, reservoirs. There are also several springs (spr) on the map above in the top left grid (I can’t give the reference as there are no numbers)
- Places of interest. These are numerous.
The above map has several symbols on that you will find useful as a walker: Firstly the pub! Pubs are very easily confused with petrol pumps! Take a look! There are several pubs, one in Little Bourton by the red line (A road) and then one in Great Bourton. These are meant to be pint glasses with handles. However, bear in mind they don’t sit exactly on the building. Buildings are small orange shapes.
Points of interest are in blue by the way on most maps. You can probably also see a campsite (a tent and half a caravan). Here are some other features you might see and may affect your walk.
Contour Lines:
These are useful to have a grasp of so that you know if your route is a steep ascent or descent. Contour lines are the squiggly orangey lines that are associated with the numbers that are often contained in a wiggly circle. Generally this is the summit of your ‘hill’. For lowland walkers, the basic rule of thumb is that the closer together the contour lines are, the steeper that part of your walk is. How to decipher if this is up or down depends on the numbers, so follow the contour line along and the ones next to it and see if it is going higher or lower in the direction in which you want to travel.
Roads, trainlines etc:
It is really useful to know what types of road you may have to cross or even if your route takes you across a railway line. There are still several in the country where footpaths go over them and you need to take responsibility of checking for trains, so if you need to avoid this for any reason, it’s useful to know what they look like on your map. As a rule of thumb: Motorways are blue, Main A roads are red (if they have a horizontal line along the middle they are dual carriageways), Orange are B roads and Yellow are very minor roads but are still accessible for vehicles. Tracks tend to be parallel dotted black lines.
Railways look like this:
If a line is no longer used, it is often labelled ‘disused’, however this does not mean it is either safe nor accessible land.
Hopefully this should give you an overview of your map and make you feel more confident when planning your routes. Remember to leave no trace and that means not just litter (including toilet paper!), but also be mindful of staying to paths, avoiding areas that are badly eroded and reading signs to ask you to keep away from areas where there might be breeding birds or new saplings. Now get out and enjoy the sunshine!
