Trying to understand how a map relates to what’s on the ground can be tricky. It requires the brain to do a lot of stuff that it doesn’t customarily do daily. This is one of the reasons that developing good navigation skills is an excellent brain-training skill – more on that later.
That can sound like a daunting process but it really isn’t. Once you start to connect the map with the landscape, you will start to see how they relate to each other. Imagine you’re a musician: the map is the sheet music; the landscape is the symphony. If you can learn to read the music, you can start to play.
Most regular walkers may have an idea about the basics of understanding the map. But most of the time we are following someone else’s route, or relying on an app to do the work for us. That‘s fair enough, but to get the most out of your map, you might want to try creating a route yourself. And that’s when the symphony really starts.
So here are the basics to get you going, and to help you on your way to becoming a more confident navigator.
1. The Basics
Route planning hinges on three things you can see on a map.
Primary features: Things in the landscape that won’t change. Hills, slopes, rivers.
Secondary features: Boundaries (walls and fences), footpaths, roads.
Spot features: Single objects that should be clearly visible, like barns, trig points or phone boxes. If it’s a hill-walk, your spot features might include the summit of your chosen hill or mountain.
Then we want to connect them, and to do that we’ll use handrails: features that make it easy because you can see them as you walk in real life as well as on the map.
A river is a handrail, so is a railway line or a drystone wall or the top edge of a line of cliffs. Following them makes it easy to know you’re going the right way. There’s no point in making navigation more difficult than it needs to be when there’s so much there to help you.
2. The lines to follow
Footpaths are marked on OS Explorer maps in a number of different ways. Often we’re tempted to rely on the green dashed lines which represent rights of way – the legal right to follow that line on foot.
But the green lines are not always what they seem. A right of way is a legal statute, not a physical feature. You can hope there’s a path there, but there might well not be. To be certain, ideally there needs to be a black dotted line underneath the green dashed line. That is a footpath – and one you can legally walk on, which is ideal.
EXPERT TIP: On an OS map, almost everything in black is definitely visible on the ground, apart from the placenames.
3. The Four Ds
Break your chosen route down into obvious sections, eg village to footbridge; footbridge to farm; farm to road bridge; road bridge to hillside; hillside to village.
Each section has an objective, and to reach each objective, you need The Four Ds.
Destination: An achievable objective, not too far away, that will be obvious when you reach it. For example, a footbridge over a river: a spot feature where two handrails cross (the footpath and the river).
Detail: What features on the map will signpost the way to that destination? What other features exist at the destination to help us confirm we’ve definitely reached it?
Distance: How far away is it?
Direction: And in what direction?
It’s perhaps the last two Ds that walkers struggle with most. Direction involves matching the map to the real world carefully. Distance can feel like maths. But you can make it simple.
Direction just means setting the map and connecting it to the landscape. Hold the map flat and turn it so that it’s set to the north but you are standing in the direction you want to go (which may mean the map is upside-down, if you’re heading south).
Once you’re sure you’re facing the right way, on the right path, project the direction with your hand. It forces you to look up at the landscape, not down the map. (I find it helps to make a whoosh noise as your hand goes out to the horizon. Be confident! WHOOSH!)
And Distance? Well the map shows you Distance all the time: it’s in the grid squares. Every grid square on your map is one kilometre by one kilometre. How many grid squares between you and the Destination? Three squares = three kilometres. Straight away that’s going to give you a rough idea of how far it is to your next destination.
EXPERT TIP: All placename text on an OS Explorer map is aligned to the north, to give you an instant idea of which way ‘up’ the map should face. (But not features like rivers, trails, roadnames etc.)
4 Staying on course
Then, the key is to stay on top of the navigating. When you’re having a conversation while you’re walking, or just enjoying your own thoughts, it’s amazing how quickly the landscape changes around you.
Sometimes if you leave it too long between switching to your ‘navigation brain’, you’ll realise you’ve passed a turning that you needed. So keep doing it as you go. Look around at how the landscape is changing, and connect it back to what you saw on the map.
When you get used to doing it, you’ll do it naturally whilst you’re also – most importantly – enjoying the walk.
5. Why navigating makes you a genius
Reading a map and following a route makes us use a process called cognitive navigation. It’s the ability to see the big picture and to change as it changes. You’re thinking past, present and future all at once: where have we come from, where are we now, and where are we going?
And you’re translating graphics on paper (or a screen) to the real world, which forces your brain to make complex connections very quickly. So navigating is a great way to keep your brain active and healthy.
And here’s my favourite bit: navigation has been officially identified as the highest cognitive function of the human brain. The people who proved that won the Nobel Prize for Physiology in 2014. So if you can engage that side of your brain, then you’re doing something extraordinary.
About our expert
Mark Reid is a navigation expert who runs a whole range of outdoor navigation and skills courses via teamwalking.co.uk. A regular contributor to Country Walking Magazine, Mark lives in the Yorkshire Dales and is the author of the Inn Way series of guidebooks (because as well as walking and navigating, he’s also a huge fan of pubs).