Our best wishes to everyone for the coming year, though hoping for a better 2021 is setting a depressingly low bar. At least the view of the snowy trees from our window taken yesterday cheers up this New Year milestone post a bit.
Our position in a CV high-risk group, plus our reliance on public transport, destroyed our backpacking hopes for 2020 – no trips at all last year. Just a single day outing to Martin Mere before CV hit us, then single-day walks from the door, a few of which we wrote up on the site.
Satisfactory local backpack routes are very difficult to devise, but we came up with one where stealth pitching would be feasible with care, as we have often done in the past, but even this route would need a few miles by taxi to the start point. However our local taxi firms seem indifferent to the pandemic. There is no mention of it on their websites and the drivers don’t even wear masks, as we discovered a few months ago when forced to use one to attend the funeral of my sister (yet another downer to add to the general theme of FU-2020).
So we wait, currently in tier 4, doing short day walks whenever we can. In the meantime keep walking wherever you are.
Its been a desperate year but especially so for people like yourself in high risk status meaning you have to be so very careful and restricting that one activity that brings you such joy and pleasure. I count myself so very lucky to live in the countryside with a large garden that’e enabled us to cope when millions of others are struggling and making sacrifices.
All the best to you both for 2021 and hoping that I’ll soon be reading your posts and filling my head with ideas for walks and wild camps 🙂
Thanks Andy.
We are very fortunate in that day-to-day life has barely been affected at all, while so many are struggling in so many ways. We have some pleasant, though flat, walking on our doorstep for numerous short outings that have kept us going.
Happy New Year Geoff. Let’s hope most of 2021 is decent. I just read your previous mapping post. Although I don’t bother with gpx files on my blog I do insert mapping of the routes. I pay £20 per annum for the OS mapping which I use for route plotting and saving routes. I really like it as it’s stable and up to date whereas some of the OS affiliates are not. I can’t recall having any problems with it at all and you can use it on however many hardware pieces you have. So it’s great on the phone or notebook when out in the wilds or at home on the Mac. I am sure you know all this but i wondered why you used layering software alternatively. Geoff I also want to say keep up the good work. I think your blog is one of the best.
Thanks Alan for those kind words. All hopes lie with a vaccine now.
The maps I display on our site come directly from the OS map-tile server via my personal API key/licence and can be controlled by the user, e.g scrolling the map window within my permitted extent limit and zooming the map to different scales etc.
I was at the heart of the acrimonious debate about displaying OS maps on personal websites when it all started way back in ~2003. At that time several walking sites were displaying static images of OS maps showing their routes, much as you are doing now, but after conversations with the OS, they emphatically stated that such sites were in violation of OS copyright and would be issued with a takedown notice if discovered. Owning maps purchased for use with mapping software was no defence: there was no existing licence to allow display of OS map images on a personal website and they would not create one.
I haven’t checked their terms for a few years now, maybe it’s all different since mobile mapping became prevalent and some of their datasets were made free (but not the 1:25000 maps of course).
On our desktops we use Memory-Map running in a Windows VM for route planning.
Thanks for that. I and I guess many hundreds of others didn’t know that about OS mapping screenshots. I thought if I paid my dues I could copy it. Well they owe me for all the advertising then. Ha. I won’t Pursue them.