Oh Well

Geograph Therapy – A Map Nut Tells All

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For the last couple of weeks I have been starting my days with a therapeutic walk, only a mile or two, but it has been a real pleasure to get out and get some exercise and fresh air on what have mainly been beautiful, bright summer mornings. I have got to be on nodding terms with a number of early rising dogs and found some footpaths I didn’t know existed. I have blogged about my surprise at discovering the the camera built into my phone actually takes semi-decent pictures and the last two mornings I have taken it out with me. I stumbled across the Geograph web site (The Geograph British Isles project aims to collect a geographically representative photograph for every square kilometre of the British Isles) one evening this week. So I have put the two together and started posting some of my snaps to the site. You can see the results at My Geograph Profile.

As you will gather from the foregoing, and the title, I have a fascination for maps. I think Geograph is a fairly pointless but interesting idea and I find it fun to participate. I have found a couple of other excellent mapping resources:

  • Old Maps has late Victorian large scale OS maps.
  • Ordnance Survey Get-A-Map (Edited 2024) has had the up to date Explorer maps (they don’t make it obvious but when you click on Print/Copy/Save the little postage stamp map displayed is really a useful large 1250px square jpg). So, in 2024, the best thing going is Bing Maps – the took over Multimap and retained the OS map option, which is fab, do check it out!

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  1. I love maps, especially OS ones. Last year we had a thing that went on for weeks, where we took a local pathfinder everywhere we went, and identifed the features. Were those photos taken with your phone???

  2. Yes, all phone pics. The light is quite difficult early in the morning but apart from that it does a pretty good job.

  3. That’s really quite cool. Can’t see me taking up early morning walks just to do it, but there we are!

  4. So can we expect to see your name up on a Geograph? E.g. “View from the north west of a Used Car Specialist.”