Tagging walks

Continuing our quest to find news ways to make it easier for people to find the right walk for them we've added a tag cloud to the walk finder page and we're tagging walks. We're automatically tagging walks with the hill tops they visit e.g. Wainwrights but we're also tagging hills with other tags e.g. walks which visit waterfalls.

Let us know what you think and also any suggestions you might have for tags we should add in future.

Here's one that would be useful for myself. As a lone walker, I have to be able to return to my vehicle. I also prefer not to retrace my steps, so therefore I propose a horseshoe route tag.

This would be useful for many people as I don't know many folks who are able to leave cars at either end of a route and exchange car keys to allow a linear route to be completed. I can think of a couple of routes that would fall into this category Fairfield and Helvellyn spring immediately to mind, I wonder if you can suggest any more.

Yeah a tag for circular walks might be useful, I much prefer taking a meandering route than simply out and back. At the mo all our walks return to the start point but I certainly have some in mind that don't where I was thinking of using the bus.

Fairfield Horseshoe goes from Ambleside and returns there so I'm not quite sure where you'ld need to position a car at the end, or swap keys. A Helvellyn spine walk could be done via bus, I met a guy doing it from Keswick to Ambleside which makes for quite a long day.

I didn't make myself very clear............did I!

Just to clear up the misunderstanding, when I said Helvellyn horseshoe, I meant doing it via Striding and Swirral edges from Patterdale. And yes! Fairfield is probably one of the nicest and most natural horseshoe routes. The other one that springs to mind is the Ennerdale but that is a real monster.......too long,too much ascent and mucho pain .

I'm pleased you mentioned the Helvellyn spine route Beth, it made me chuckle. When I last did it, we started from Kirkstone, the other party, started from Clough Head. They thought they could make it easy for themselves by taking the Land Rover, over the Old Coach Road. It got very stuck and we had to dig it out the next day. The driver had to buy the whole team a cup of tea in Ambleside, for getting him out of the brown and smelly stuff. An expensive lesson, learned.

That Bus idea Beth, is one I had never considered, as previously when I was with RAFMR there were always vehicles to pick the party up, if a linear route was being undertaken.

I wonder if Paul can do something really clever........Here's my idea.......

1. Plan your route on the maps
2. Input how many minutes break you intend to take, during the day
3. Input the location where you are staying
4. The computer tells you which bus to catch to your walk and back to your accommodation

Hope you think this is a good idea.........Anything to keep cars off the Lake District roads, can't be bad.

Hehe... the old brain gears have been grinding along today. Sometime ago I found a database of all the bus stops in the UK, couple this with some bus timetables... and... well watch this space!

Well here are all the bus stops in the Lakes. Although as that page makes clear I've got some way to go yet before I'm confident about putting stops onto our walk and hill maps.

I DON'T BELEIVE IT!!!!!

When Beth mentioned catching a bus, I thought "OK, but how can I guarantee there will be a bus service, a stop at end of route etc etc."

Then I made my previous post. I said to myself. "If this doesn't manage to make Paul's brain explode, then nothing will"

Well it look's like I will have to think of something even more fiendish to give Paul to do......... My brain is just about to go into overdrive.

Heh. And you'll have seen that I've now got it working properly integrated with our walks. I'm hoping to go back and do the same with each hill page and also for that complete Lake District page above.

I'd really like to do the same thing for the whole of the UK (I do now have access to the data which would let me do that) but it's a huge exercise and wouldn't directly benefit WalkLakes and I've got a long list of things I need to do which do first.