WalkLakes Christmas Holiday Newsletter

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WalkLakes

Dear

Welcome to another of our occasional mailings to people like you who have registered on our web site WalkLakes or its sister site Great British Hills. We hope you've all had a good Christmas and are looking forward to a good year of walking in 2014 and, as ever, we are here to help.

Great British Hills

If you originally signed up to our sister site Great British Hills then you may be wondering why you're getting email from WalkLakes. We were originally planning to have two sites: one general site for British walkers with details of all the tops you can bag, mapping etc and a site for our walk researching activity in the Lake District (which would also carry the same information as Great British Hills). However we found that Google penalised us in searches for doing this so we've now merged Great British Hills into WalkLakes. Fear not however: all the facilities of Great British Hills remain, including the hill finder, and we've also now significantly improved our route planner software (see below) so we hope you'll stay with us.

New Walk Ratings

Since our last mailing we've completed a major exercise to give all our walks an overall rating between one fell ( ) and five fells ( ) based on a combination of distance, ascent and the other factors we score a walk on like terrain, bog factor, and technical difficulty. So using that we're now sorting the walks we find for you by overall rating rather than simply by distance.

So why not give our walk finder a try and see if you can find the perfect walk for you? You can search by location on a map, or walks near a selection of villages, towns or lakes, or select a tag from our tag cloud. Or if none of those methods suits then enter a postcode or other feature from a 1:50K OS map and we'll find you the nearest walks to there.

New Route Planner Software

As many of you already know our route planner is now running our latest software so, if you want to plan your own walks, and especially if you use a GPS, then do give it a go. It lets you download tracks you've recorded on your GPS and also allows you to create a route to upload to your GPS. It tells you how long they are and, just like our walk descriptions, can show you a profile of your walk. And, if you register and then log in, you also get access to our new 1:25,000 scale mapping and aerial photography to make your route planning even easier.

In the future we are planning to add the ability to save your GPX files on our server and better integration with our log book and forum facilities, so when you save a GPX track it will offer to add any tops the track passes through into your log book for you and also make it easier for your to write a walk report in our forum.

New Walks

When the better weather this summer and autumn we were able to get on in earnest with filling in some of the gaps in our walks database and we are still publishing them through the winter.

We've also been doing more work in the north and central areas in particular this year and, having already walked every Wainwright in his The North Western Fells, we've now completed his The Northern Fells. So that's the second of his books which we've completed.

Now, alongside walks to other tops (we're not only doing Wainwrights) we're working hard on the other books and it looks like The Central Fells will be the next one we can tick off.

Here are a some of our walks taking in fells from The Northern Fells:

• A longer walk over Bakestall and Skiddaw - we do have a shorter walk up Skiddaw too but this longer route takes a more measured route taking you around behind Skiddaw so that you approach via Bakestall and we think it's well worth the extra distance if you have time.
  
  
• Great Calva and Knott from Mosedale - the Back O' Skiddaw is an area of high moorland which feels quite remote and relatively quiet and this walk takes you across it to Great Calva and Knott.
  
  
• Longlands, Lowthwaite, and Brae Fells - this is a short circular walk over the grassy fells of Longlands Fell, Lowthwaite Fell, and Brae Fell, with the return dropping down to the dramatic Charleton Gill. Views to the north west extend over the Solway Firth to the hills of Dumfries and Galloway.

Long Distance Paths Downgraded

As part of our programme of researching walks in the Lake District we are planning to walk all the Long Distance Paths (LDPs) in Lakeland. The obvious one is the Cumbria Way of course but we are also planning to do the Allerdale Ramble and the Cumbria Coastal Way and later possible the Cistercian Way. However we discovered while planning for this that both the Allerdale Ramble and Cumbria Coastal Way are no longer endorsed by Cumbria County Council and hence the Ordnance Survey no longer show the route for either on their latest maps (or online map tiles).

The Allerdale Ramble remains walkable as it only uses rights of way but the Cumbria Coastal Way is now problematic because in part it uses permissive paths. The good news is that work on a new National Trail, the England Coast Path, is now well under way. The first section of which in Cumbria should be open late spring 2014, from Allonby to Whitehaven, with more to follow. You can more about this on the Natural England web site.

You can read more about this issue and our correspondence with both the Ordnance Survey and Cumbria County Council in this article on our web site.

Social Media

We're all over the Internet like a rash. You can find us on Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and Tumblr and Pinterest so if any of these are places where you like to be then why not like/follow/join us there as appropriate.

Improvements to Log Book

When you are logged in you may have noticed a link top right for "your log book". We've been doing a lot of work to improve the log book facility recently. For a start we've added maps so you can see where the tops you've "bagged" are located. And when you dig down to look at specific hill types it also shows you the tops you've yet to bag of that type. You can do mass updates of previous bagging activity from your log book (in addition to being able to log hills by either visiting the appropriate hill page or writing a walk report - see below).

All of this is a view of your log which only you can see but other users will know if you've climbed a hill if they visit the hill page. For example look at the Latrigg page to see that:

Other walkers registered on our site who have already walked up this hill include: TallPaul and beth.

And TallPaul wrote a public walk report for the forum so there is a link to that from the hill page.

More importantly if you post to our forum then your brief profile to the right of your post includes a summary of your bagging stats.

So on your left is TallPaul, with their one Wainwright, and on the right is beth with 159 plus 2 Wainwright Outlying Fells.

Which neatly brings us on to ...

Our Forum

People are now starting to post to our forum, which is nice. pistolrider in particular has been active recently. For example on Christmas Day he posted this excellent report of his Christmas Eve walk in mid-Wales. As he logged the tops he visited you can see that his totals on the right of his post now include those Marilyns,  Hewitts and Nuttalls. We welcome more walk reports of course, so please feel free to join in.

We've also added a new forum Promo Codes & Offers where we are letting you know about special offers and promo codes for extra discounts from our advertisers. They'll save you money and we still get our commission - at no extra cost to you.

Looking for Accommodation?

And finally, with Christmas now behind us it's the ideal time to start thinking about your 2014 holidays so don't forget that our room finder can help you find the perfect accommodation (and not just in the Lakes either, just pick a hill near where you're going and it'll find you somewhere to stay). We use a combination of properties from LateRooms and Sykes Cottages portfolios plus properties listed by the owners themselves to ensure you get the widest selection of hotels, guest houses, B&Bs, campsites and bunk houses as well as a wide range of self catering cottages.

And by booking your accommodation through our site you help fund our work so we can continue to offer you more and more of the best walks in the Lake District.

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