South West Coast Path WalkPlanners

Planning walks on a long-distance path can be quite challenging – even short walks, unless you are content to walk from A to B and back to A, but multi-day walks even more so. If you want help planning your days or weeks on the fabulous South West Coast Path, you can turn to the many published guide-books devoted to the path. But over many years walking the path, we've learnt that the ideal place for information about walks is not in a book but on a map, where all the information about a given stretch is readily to hand.

That's what our SWCP WalkPlanners give you.

Covering all the bases

WalkPlanners focus on the essentials of walk planning. Will the walk you're looking at suit your abilities and appetites? How will you access it? The back cover of the first SWCP WalkPlanner, the lodging edition east sheet, is shown on the right and gives a good idea of what you'll find on the map.

Some features really work only on a map – bus routes, remote car park locations, for example. Others are just clearer on a full-colour map than in grey on the pages of a book – effort ratings of each stage, marked in colour, for example (see below). Others are just more convenient on a map – lists of lodgings at each end of a stage, for example.

And a map makes obvious sense for logging your walks, by colouring in the coastal line we've provided.

Stage by stage

The foundation of planning walks on the coast path or any long distance path is stages – stretches you can sensibly hope to walk in a day, or half a day. Existing guide-books provide itineraries based on any number of stages, from 45 to 70. The trouble is, even 70 stages involves some very long, challenging stages that elderly or unfit walkers can't handle.

We've opted for shorter stages, numbering 87 at the last count. People who want more of a challenge can simply tackle two or three at one go.

We've also devised a unique, objective way of conveying how much of a challenge each stage represents. Stages are rated according to length and height gain, and put into colour coded groups so that you can easily see from the map what you're in for. The sample on the left shows three stages in south Devon, in the groups Demanding, Pretty Easy and Easy (bottom to top).

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