If you’re planning on visiting Pembrokeshire over the half-term holiday and want to explore the area and enjoy some great food – then we know the app for you! Real Food Wales is a new iPhone app from one of our GeoVation Challenge winners, and it can help you discover local, sustainable and delicious food along the Welsh Coast Path in Pembrokeshire.
Helen and Nicola Steer, sisters from South Wales, were one of five successful ventures in last year’s GeoVation Challenge, which asked entrepreneurs across Great Britain to use innovation and geography to come up with ideas to help connect communities and visitors along the new Welsh Coast Path.
The Real Food Wales team used their unique network of local knowledge to displaying a large selection of food businesses on an offline interactive map of Pembrokeshire. Real Food Wales maps over 150 of the best food businesses in Pembrokeshire, helping you access sustainable and delicious food. It’s the ideal app if you’re looking for a special meal at a restaurant, a bite to eat in a quirky café, the best sausage in town for your campfire or a food experience you’ll never forget.
The core feature of Real Food Wales is the interactive map, consisting of five zoom levels, which allow users to find the best places to eat out, buy food or have a foodie experience. The map of Pembrokeshire is stored onto your device, so you can access the information even when there is no mobile signal.
Continue reading 'Have a foodie experience with the Real Food Wales app'»
We are at the Hay Festival for the next couple of weeks so we thought we would share the fun with a couple of walks in and around Hay-on-Wye for our regular Wednesday walks on the blog.
The Literary Festival which runs from 23 May – 2 June includes some guided walks and also some foraging walks, but if you would like to explore the area more, there is also a Hay Walking Festival which takes place from 10 – 14 October 2013.
This walk has been supplied by the team at the Hay Walking Festival
This walk takes you into town, passing Hay castle and then down to Lion street where you pick up a path across fields to join a short stretch of the the long distance Wye Valley walk. After a couple fields you leave this path turning right onto an old track through a fine avenue of old estate trees, reaching the B4352. Crossing the road , the path goes straight up into Mouse Castle Woods, a lovely ancient woodland , with fine views back down into Hay. The route proceeds using tracks and field paths to Cusop, returning to Hay via Cusop Dingle, then returning back to the festival site via a network of footpaths.
We’ve imported the co-ordinates and route for this walk into OS getamap and you can print or download the walk to your OS MapFinder app or GPS device. Alternatively, it’s on OL13 in our online mapshop
Guest blog by Jayne Phenton at Living Streets
Although my school days were a long time ago I still vividly remember was the walk to school. Walking with my mum when I was small – chatting, looking out for things for the nature table on the way – and then, when I was older, with my school mates. Starting to walk to school on your own was a natural rite of passage.
Fast forward a good number of years and it seems that is no longer the case. Less than half of primary school children walk to school and even fewer older children. This week is Walk to School Week and today (20 May 2013), Living Streets has published Must Try Harder, a half-term school report on the current generation’s journey to school.
The statistics from a YouGov poll commissioned by Living Streets are alarming – one in five parents have never even considered their child walking to school, despite the majority of children not getting the recommended one hour of physical activity a day and one in five of them leaving primary school overweight or obese. So as the numbers of children walking to school slowly declines over generations – in my mother’s day 94% of children walked to school – how do we reverse the trend?
From the Walk Once a Week (WoW) scheme and outreach projects which Living Streets runs to increase walking rates and reduce the congestion and air pollution which plagues many school gates, we know that children enjoy walking to school. They enjoy spending time with their friends, it builds their confidence and they like the feeling of independence.
Continue reading 'Walk to School Week'»
Guest blog by Jayne Phenton, Media Co-ordinator for Living Streets @livingstreets
Last weekend I visited Wiltshire and walked seven or so miles up to Bratton Camp and back.
The landlady of the B&B where I was staying was shocked. ‘You must be very fit’, she said. ‘Jayne walks to work every day’, said my friend. Her jaw dropped further. ‘It’s less than two and quarter miles’, I reassured her.
‘I’m the sort of person who parks right outside the shop’, said Mrs Fawlty, looking shame-faced. I suggested she might give walking a go during Walk to Work Week,13-17 May, which is part of National Walking Month run by Living Streets.
I’m fortunate to live a 40 minute walk away from the Living Streets office in London and especially so because my commute takes me across the River Thames and past historic sites like the Tower of London.
But whatever your route, a brisk walk to work is a great opportunity to clear your head, and prepare for your day. Walking is great for your health in every kind of way. It’s a valuable weight bearing exercise, an excellent work out for your heart, proven to be good for your mental wellbeing and you’re strengthening 200 muscles with minimal impact on your joints.
If you do want to lose a pound or two then building some walking into your day is going to help. Just half an hour’s walk to work and home again could use up to 250 calories. Sign up on Living Streets’ website www.walktowork.org.uk and you can log your walks, see how many muffins you’ve burned off and compete with your colleagues to see who can be top walker.
Continue reading 'Getting fitter needn’t be an uphill struggle!'»
The Keswick Mountain Festival is the largest event of its kind in the UK and we’re proud to be the official mapping partner of the Festival this year. Set in the heart of the Lake District, it inspires thousands of visitors to get into the great outdoors, try new activities and enjoy exciting experiences.
The event, which is being held at Crow Park in Keswick from Wednesday 15– Sunday 19 May, promises to be jam packed with leisure activities (cycling, climbing, hiking, swimming, kayaking, triathlons and more) inspirational speakers such as Chris Bonington, Graham Obree and John Beatty, live music, parties, swim clinics and map reading workshops. If you love the outdoors then this event is not to be missed.
Not only that, but if you book an activity at the Festival, you’ll receive a discount code giving you one month’s free access to OS getamap, our online route-planning and printing service. Over 140,000 routes have been drawn since its launch in March 2011. Subscribers benefit from free A4 Ordnance Survey mapping prints, extra route editing tools and full screen map view all for only £19.99 per annum.
Over the Bank Holiday weekend three surveyors from G&J Surveys were accompanied by Ordnance Survey’s Geodetic Analyst Mark Greaves to accurately measure the height of Tal y Fan, one of the smallest mountains in Wales.
Tal y Fan has a map height of 610 m (flush bracket height at triangulation pillar of 610.209 m) which is very close to the 609.6 m (2,000 ft) height that is generally accepted as defining mountain status in England and Wales. The weekend expedition was to check whether Tal y Fan should still hold mountain status or whether it should be reclassified as a hill.
Tal y Fan translates as The End Peak or Peak End. It is the most northerly of the 2,000 ft mountains in Wales and is situated at the end of the Carneddau mountain range. Part of this mountain range forms the greatest continuous height above 3,000ft of any land in Britain south of the Scottish border. Beyond Tal y Fan are the fertile pastures of the Conwy valley and then the sea. The history in the immediate vicinity of Tal y Fan dates back to prehistoric times as two monoliths still stand at the gateway to Bwlch y Ddeufaen (Pass of the Two Stones), this is the old pass through the mountains that was still in use during Roman times.
The aim of the survey was to survey the very highest point of Tal y Fan and gather a minimum of two hours of summit data. After an afternoon of capturing height data the team returned to the Valley where it was down to Ordnance Survey’s Mark Greaves to process the data.
After double checking the results it was then the responsibility of BBC Breakfast to reveal the results live on Monday morning. At 6.50 am live on BBC One it was confirmed that Tal y Fan measured 609.98 m (2,001 ft), some 38 cm (1 ft 3 in) above that needed to qualify for mountain status.
Read the BBC article too: ow.ly/kMc64
Since its launch in January our outdoor navigation app, OS MapFinder, has now reached over 100,000 downloads and over 600,000 sessions. We’re thrilled with the success of the app, available now on the App Store, designed to map the way for walkers, runners and cyclists across Great Britain.
Our free-to-download iOS app contains overview mapping of the whole country alongside a sample tile of our detailed walking and cycling maps. You can then purchase more 1:25 000 and 1:50 000 in 100 km2 tiles (the same scales as our popular OS Landranger and OS Explorer paper maps) of the areas you want.
The four most popular tiles downloaded so far are:
| 1 Edge of Peak District |
| 2 South Downs/Hailsham |
| 3 Peak District |
| 4 Lake District |
Very popular areas for enjoying the British countryside!
Continue reading 'Our OS MapFinder app hits 100,000 downloads'»
The month of May marks the first birthday for the Wales Coast Path, a 870-mile route to take you around the whole coast of Wales. And if you’re really up for a challenge, you can make it 1027 miles by including the Offa’s Dyke!
Walking costs nothing, and the path is open to everyone. You can walk the path from north to south or vice versa. You can ride or cycle some parts and you can make it into very short chunks or set yourself a charity challenge and do the whole thing in one go.
To join in the celebrations, we’re featuring a walk of the week that uses part of the Wales Coast Path along the way…
Our coastal loop around Nash Point and Llantwit Major starts near the lighthouses at Nash Point and moves into the picturesque town of Llantwit Major, about 20 miles south-west of Cardiff. It’s an historic town with a history stretching back over 3000 years. The narrow winding streets are lovely to walk around – although do take care as most don’t have pavements. You could also stop off at one of the pubs in the town to break your walk – I had an excellent Sunday roast at The Old Swan Inn with family a couple of months ago.
Continue reading 'The Wales Coast Path is one year old in May!'»
Routes are now easy to share on OS MapFinder
We’ve recently released OS MapFinder v1.3 in the App Store and there are a host of route sharing features now available on our popular outdoors app. Some of you told us that you’d like to be able to use OS MapFinder in conjunction with your subscription to OS getamap, our online route planning service, and you’ll be pleased to hear that we’ve done just that. You can now import and export GPX routes to and from OS MapFinder – so it works with OS getamap routes that you’ve already planned, as well as any third party apps and sites that create GPX files.
Not only that, but we’ve also added social integration features to our navigation app. This makes it easy for you to share routes with friends and family via Facebook, Twitter, email and more.
You’ve always been able to sync any maps you purchased between your iOS devices and we’ve listened to your feedback on being able to sync routes between your devices. Once you download version 1.3 of OS MapFinder, you’ll be able to do just that. Any devices linked to the same Apple ID will be able to sync routes and map purchases from now on.
To celebrate the new version we’ve also extended our price drop for many map purchases into Spring with up to 40% off 100km2 tiles at 1:25 000 scale.
Continue reading 'Are you sharing your OS MapFinder routes?'»
Image of the Prime Meridian at Greenwich produced courtesy of Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Prime_meridian.jpg
We love to read about people who enjoy walking and the great outdoors as much as us – and Graham and Hilda Heap certainly fit the bill. The duo have recently devised a 273-mile long distance footpath which follows the line of the Greenwich Merdian.
The Greenwich Merdian Trail is now documented in a series of four books following the trail from it’s start in Peacehaven, Sussex, along the line of Prime Meridian to Sand Le Mere on the Holderness coast.The couple, from East Sussex, spent six years putting the trail together, and researching and walking the route to create their guidebooks.
The Greenwich Meridian itself is popular with visitors who make their way to the Royal Observatory at Greenwich to stand astride the line which separates east from west. Of course, the line of the Meridian continues through Britain, as well as many other countries on it’s journey from pole to pole. Graham and Hilda’s project aimed to create a route which follows the line of the Prime Meridian as closely as possible while following public rights of way.
Continue reading 'Walk the line on the Greenwich Meridian Trail'»
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