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South Shropshire Mapping |
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(Click, or double click, on any photo to see a larger picture) |
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First and foremost .. users of this map data do so at your own risk. The author accepts no responsibility for errors, omissions, and people following footpaths over cliffs. There are no deliberate errors, but there are probably some accidental ones, and things do change over time .. what was a passable footpath yesterday might be a quagmire, or infested with rabid cattle, next week.
Nor do I accept any responsibility if the map eats your Garmin GPS handset. All I can say is that it hasn't eaten mine (yet). I recommend downloading to the GPS using 'Sendmap' .. Google will find the latest version if it has moved from http://cgpsmapper.com/ . You can also use Garmin's 'Mapsource' program but that requires registry Edits. If you want to use mapsource you'll also need the testmap.img and testmap.tdb files (included in the .zip) .. if you use Sendmap, you just need the detailed .img files.
Thanks to Oziexplorer cGPSMapper and Mapedit for compiling the Garmin .img file(s), and the Shropshire County Council for help with footpath data. NASA for SRTM data, and 3DEM and DEM2TOPO software for turning it into contours.
You are licensed to do whatever you like with the map, as long as you do not charge for it (normal open source licensing rules apply), and give due credit.
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This is a =walking= map .. I make no distinction between Bridleways and Footpaths. All the roads shown are supposed to be public ('County') roads, so you can walk on them - in many cases there is no footpath ('sidewalk') and the traffic is ludicrously fast, so take care. I've mapped three classes of road .. 'A', 'B' and 'other' .. 'other' are typically single lane, often with grass growing down the middle! ROWs are also shown as 3 types ‘Private Drive’ is a passable ROW which is all surfaced, unpaved road is a passable ROW which isn’t, and ‘track/trail’ is a supposed ROW which failed my inspection, and may be hazardous or impassable.
This is a Shropshire map. Bits of Herefordshire and Worcestershire (among others) may appear, but there won't be much Right of Way data for them, because they aren't Shropshire. Contours have been generated for the whole county, but road/river data is only entered for the southern half, and only a small fraction of that is so far surveyed for footpaths..
Right of way (and some road) data is derived from GPS tracklogs, as are stile/gate/waymark positions, Churches, Pubs, Garages, and places to park. Accuracy should be in the +/- 10m range. Other items are hand captured from 1947 ('New Popular Edition') OS sheets 129 & 130 . Accuracy here is +/- 100m, given the difficulty of digitizing ancient paper maps, and the fact that OS survey data (1915, much of it) lacks somewhat in the accuracy department. For contours, don’t expect your GPS height measurement to match nearer than about 20m. I also have better things to do than trace rivers to the nearest yard .. consider it 'very approximate' except where it runs into the footpaths .. I promise that where the footpath has a footbridge, or ford, the river was definitely at that spot too!
Unusual symbols .. if you zoom in on a footpath you will see white, green, yellow, red, black, or blue 'Navaid' symbols. Since you are not yachting in the Solent, you can safely assume these are not what they claim.
Basically 'Black' means the footpath is a non starter unless you are in the SAS or similar .. foot deep mud, head high briars, barbed wire fences straight from Stalag 13, or three foot deep twenty foot wide rivers to ford. Hint: avoid! Any ROW segment containing one of these will have failed.
Red - the footpath is seriously defective .. broken gates you need to climb over, mud/slurry puddles in gates and farmyards that require wellies, or at least gaiters, briars and brambles (but no more than chest high), discarded bits of wire fence buried in the undergrowth to act as ad-hoc mantraps. Foot deep water you have to walk through. Nothing that will actually turn you back., but again the ROW will have been failed.
Yellow - minor annoyances (when I bother to report them). Footpath cropped over, but only small crops. Stiles that lack steps. Electric fences.
Green/White - well, it worked Ok for me, when I last tried it. (White actually means the survey accuracy needs improving). Blue—I use these where an ROW has been officially moved or extinguished since the 1:25k OS map was surveyed (so the OS map is wrong here).
Route accuracy:- the Footpath/Bridleway ('trails') tracks should follow the actual path I walked, with trackpoints being generated at 10m intervals. Where the trails are labelled as "dddd/rr-y/Type" this is as close as I could get to the ROW as I believe it to be, based on whatever data the County Council have been able to provide, modified by the waymarked gates/stiles, sprayed out paths, etc. actually on the ground. When the ROW takes abrupt turns in open or cropped fields, based on long erased field boundaries, it is not always possible (or desirable) to exactly duplicate these turns on the ground.
Where the path is unclear, or blocked, or where two equally likely routes appear to exist, or where the mass of humanity appears to be ignoring the ROW in favour of a better path, I may have a trail labelled 'FP XX Alternate'. This is probably not a ROW.
Anything labelled 'FP XX IMAGINARY' is my guess at where the ROW goes, but was/is not walkable at all, and may not even have a viable alternate route.
In particular the trails shown on this map DO NOT represent the definitive ROW data .. if you want that, please contact the County Council.
Anything unlabelled probably means the path is not a ROW (many such paths in the Wyre forest, the Burwarton Estate, and now on 'Open access' common land). Where a path/track is known to be private it will be normally be labelled as such. The labelling is 4 digit Parish code, followed by /ROW number-segment number, and finally /type (FP, BW, BOAT, or RUPP). This is the same format the CC uses on Shropmap (and elsewhere).
In the interests of reducing clutter, most ‘Navaid’ symbols come with cryptic clues. A Key is available HERE. 'Points of Interest' are restricted to 'out in the sticks' places. Yes, the major towns (Craven Arms, Ludlow, Bridgnorth, Much Wenlock, Church Stretton not to mention Shrewsbury) have places to park, shops, petrol stations etc. but you could probably figure that out yourself .. for my purposes the place you can get a pork pie =without= entering 'civilization' are more interesting. Note however that these places are definitely not 24/7! Farms and houses and churches are shown for navigation purposes, not because they offer any form of service.
Any questions/suggestions please email the author at gsv at quik dot clara dot co dot uk. I don't guarantee to reply, but I usually do.
This is very much 'work in progress', but there are an awful lot of footpaths in Shropshire so don't expect progress to be all that fast. The survey report .zip file actually contains a list and total of all the ROWs that ‘Shropmap’ would tell me about on 26/Dec/2005 .. A bit over 5500km.
The contour data is stored as a separate (transparent) map image (10000014.img, in the .zip file). That means that you can turn it off at the GPS handset if you want to, and you can use it as an overlay for any of the normal Garmin maps, including the (massively inaccurate) European basemap, as well as for the Shropshire map.
Also available is a zipped Excel (.xls) spreadsheet of the current state of the survey (as reported to Shropshire County Council). Note that it is going to be perpetually out of date (just like the map) since they are continually fixing things, however it may give you a clue what to prepare for, if you dislike surprises.
The image below shows a small section (around Abdon Burf) of the level of detail available. Double click it for a larger view—if you download the map and use the edit/viewer gpsmapedit You can zoom in much further—down to about a meter!
Get The Map (.zip file, <4 Mbytes) Get the Survey Reports (.zipped .xls file, <1 Mbyte) |
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I’ve also completed contour maps for the whole UK+Eire — see the SMC (Scottish Mountaineering Club) website, because I don’t have the space or bandwidth to store them here:
Finally, much of the Shropshire path data is now on-line, although you can’t download it to your GPS, and it only shows where the paths are supposed to be (my map shows where I could actually walk). You can access Shropmap at:
http://maps.shropshire.gov.uk/website/shropmap/viewer.htm?Service=Leisure&Layers=001&ActiveLayer=2 |
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The area surveyed so far (as of April 2008) is shown below. |
