Last week I was trying to persuade you to get out into the countryside. If you are feeling tempted, but aren’t too familiar with what lies the other side of the hedgerow then the best idea is to pick up a copy of the Ordnance Survey map from the Explorer series, which covers your immediate area. There are a staggering 140,000 miles of public rights of way – including footpaths, bridle paths and by-ways in England and Wales, with over 4,200 miles of them in Kent alone, so if you’ve ever driven past a footpath sign by the roadside and thought “I wonder where that goes?” the answer can be found in these maps. They have a scale of 1:25000 which is 2 ½ inches to the mile as you view the map so there’s plenty of detail in them. The complete set of 403 maps covering the entire country is currently on sale at a special offer price of £2650, but let’s take this one step at a time! £8 or less will get you your local map. In it you’ll find a treasure trove of information covering all roads, footpaths, by-ways, cycle routes, long distance trails and other public access routes. Printed in colour to make it easy to distinguish between built up districts, woodland and forest, farmland, rivers, ponds and lakes and with roads colour coded to show their classification. If you’re planning some medium or long distance walking or running, you really can’t do without explorer maps.
Every imaginable feature is shown – View points, pubs, churches, bus and train stations, quarries, embankments, ancient monuments, castles, ruins and battlefields, and down to more prosaic things such as telephone boxes and electricity lines and pylons (very helpful when route finding). Contours shown at 5 metre vertical intervals tell you if you should expect a flat walk or run, or be prepared for some strenuous climbing. And you can polish your map reading skills by checking your position or destination against the national grid reference lines which are featured.
The maps are covered with symbols to help if you are looking for available leisure pursuits and tourist type information such as National trust / English heritage sites, public gardens, camp sites, visitor centres, sports centres, theme parks, picnic sites, golf courses, fishing, horse riding etc etc. The list goes on. And before you ask, no I’m not on commission from Ordnance survey sales dept!!! But anyway, get even more info at www.ordnancesurveyleisure.co.uk
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