Collected Musings of a Hill Wanderer

The turning of a year is often time to take stock and look back upon what has just gone by. For whatever reason, the beginning of 2008 feels like an eternity ago. Over its course, there have been many journeys for me, be they explorations of wonderful countryside or meanderings of the mind; I didn’t rename this space "Collected Musings of a Hill Wanderer" a year ago for nothing. World events have taken on their own dramatic itineraries too but that’s not what I do here. If anything, getting out for a walk in open hill country allows for an escape from the rough and tumble that surrounds us.

With all the revolution in the air, I have taken an evolutionary path with this blog. Its content has been honed over the past twelve months with a greater emphasis placed on outdoors matters than ever before. Entries devoted to public transport matters presented opportunities presented opportunities for tangential diversions so these have been diverted to another blog unless the subjects directly affect the reaching of walking destinations without needing to be self sufficient on the transport front.

Another subject that crops up here from time to time is the gear that I use for my hiking. Of course, being more interested in appreciating the wonder of the outdoors, it is far from being my main interest. In any case, gear purchases weren’t that many in number anyway but the introduction of my Scarpa boots to more regular use generated some comment on my part. Trail shoes reached retirement without comment and were replaced satisfactorily by Strives and Hedgehogs from TNF (I have a soft spot for trail shoes that needs to be controlled). A soft shell jacket from The North Face was added to my collection in June and became well used over the summer, earning its place as a valued piece of kit. Looking towards a future with greater independence on the accommodation front, I bought a sleeping bag from Alpkit. That’s a subject that I broached last year but remains an avenue of which I have yet only tantalising glimpses. As I said earlier, it’s not about the gear but the journeys that it allows me to undertake that matters.

Speaking of journeys, it has been the overview of trips undertaken that have formed the framework for previous annual reviews in 2007 and 2006. This year, I am going to split things up so that they don’t become too large to digest and I want to include wider musings anyway. The next part in this review will take in journeys for the first part of 2008 followed by another one for the second half of the year. Every one of these trips has been brought about by by my ever present wonder of the natural world, even that influenced heavily by human activity like what we find in the U.K. With all of the ominous portents that surrounds it is probably worth remembering William Henry Davies’ Leisure:

WHAT is this life if, full of care,
We have no time to stand and stare?—

No time to stand beneath the boughs,
And stare as long as sheep and cows:

No time to see, when woods we pass,
Where squirrels hide their nuts in grass:

No time to see, in broad daylight,
Streams full of stars, like skies at night:

No time to turn at Beauty’s glance,
And watch her feet, how they can dance:

No time to wait till her mouth can
Enrich that smile her eyes began?

A poor life this if, full of care,
We have no time to stand and stare.

I only hope that some of the above sentiment can be conveyed in what appears on here in 2009, the blog’s fourth calender year, and that it will be a year filled with hikes and cycles like its immediate predecessor. That wish applies as much for you as it does for me.

If you were to ask me about digital mapping for the Irish Republic this time last year, you would have been told about OSi’s Trail Master DVD’s. They may not have covered the whole country but what they did was nothing to be derided. Perhaps unsurprisingly, things have changed a lot since then. For one thing, it is now possible to find all of OSi’s 1:50000 Discovery mapping available for free on the web. I must admit that I came across it by accident and after I had used the "City" zoom level (yes, that’s what they call it). The quality of the rendition may feel imperfect but it is hard to argue with there being no cost involved.

What brought this re-visitation about was the announcement before Christmas that Trail Master mapping was coming to GeoLives. Then, I didn’t have the time to explore what this meant because of the pre-Christmas necessities but I have been able to set that to rights now that we are in 2009. For many, the mention of GeoLives might demand some explanation. Put at its simplest, it provides digital mapping much in the same way that Anquet and Mapyx do it: while you used to have to buy Trail Master DVD’s from OSi previously, you can now download the same data and more from GeoLives.

There is more to GeoLives than Irish digital mapping and it features Belgian, Dutch, French and Swiss data too. In fact, the organisation is based in Luxembourg and was established last year as a collaboration between a provider of geographic data (STAR-APIC) and a specialist in internet applications (Géomatic Ingénierie). Of the countries whose data are included, it is for France, Switzerland and Éire that there is mapping most relevant to walkers.

Like Anquet and Mapyx, Windows-only software can be downloaded for working with any downloaded maps. For users of alternative operating systems like OS X and Linux (that’s the one I mainly use at home), there is a web-based application for performing the same functions as the Windows application and there’s nothing to stop your using it on Windows either. GeoLives calls the former the PC Editor and the latter its Web Editor. The reason for the use of the word "Editor" here is the inclusion of route planning capability in both and I can vouch for inclusion of place searching functionality too. I cannot say that I have been testing out the route planning pieces so far but they look similar to what you find with offerings from the main purveyors of British digital mapping. With the Web Editor, there is the possibility of sharing your routes with other GeoLives users.

A €15 tariff needs to be paid before you can get going with the service. Since I already owned Trail Master mapping, I could use my OSi login credentials and even had pre-acquired Trail Master data made available to me online without need for payment above and beyond the subscription.

Buying mapping works on the principle of using up credit that you have purchased beforehand; it’s available in €10, €20 and €50 denominations. Then, you can buy maps by the tile or bundled in Supermaps. Even if you don’t make any purchase, certain large scale maps come as part of the subscription but these are little use to the walker. Once tiles are bought, they become available through the web application and can also be downloaded too within 48 hours of an email containing the requisite link being sent to you. Downloading the data for offline use is something that I have found troublesome with timeouts blighting the experience; the fact that we are talking large files here doesn’t help matters, even if they are wonderfully crisp in their appearance. GeoLives would appear to have some way to go before the process becomes as painless and that with either Anquet or Mapyx. For now, it’s just as well that there is the web application.

In summary, this is an interesting service that I hopefully will continue to explore. As I intimated earlier, I have yet to try out the route planning side of things and I would like to see data downloads become far more reliable than they currently are. Despite this, it could be that GeoLives becomes a purveyor of digital mapping for all of Europe and it seems to have made a good start. Let’s hope that it continues to grow and to improve.

Being the time of year that it is, I have been doing a spot of browsing of outdoor retailers on the web to see if any tempting bargains lay in waiting. One that caught my eye was Cotswold’s reductions on Raichle Mountain Trail boots of around the £60 mark. However, all may not be what it seems because a furtive wander about the web revealed durability issues. Whether these are as prevalent as they would appear to be is something that I cannot confirm but any reports that I saw certainly took the shine off the offers and I for one will be hanging onto my money. If there is a genuine problem with longevity, it does sound like something that Raichle should be addressing rather than garnering a lower rent reputation than the likes of Meindl or Scarpa while charging similar prices.

Hope that the Christmas season has been kind to all of you and that you have had a chance to clear out of that mental clutter that has accumulated over the past year. For those of you who have been regular visitors, thanks for joining me on this journey and I hope that I will continue to give you more and new reasons to keep coming back. My now customary post where I cast my mind back over the previous year is on the to do list and I hope that the coming year will allow us all more opportunities for exploring wonderful countryside. For now though, I wish you all of the very best for 2009 and that any economic turbulence that might come will not affect you too greatly or, even better, have no impact on you at all.