My Cape Wrath Trail route…as it stands today. View on larger map
I should also add that my feelings are now that a few of these stages would be very dificult in winter. In January I found that seven hours of light and weather conditions made stages of over 20km pretty much unrealistic. You could do the odd day as I did starting and finishing with headtorch, but it’s not much fun.
In summer I think this would be a good route for a reasonably fit walker.
The full, awe-inspiring length of the Cape Wrath Trail as seen on Google Earth. If you don’t want to download it, Flash Earth is also worth a look.
Another Cape Wrath Route from ongopongo.com. This one differs quite substantially from my own, I’m posting it as it contains some useful addresses of Post Offices along the way - vital for sending re-supply packages or posting used maps home.
I love maps. One of my greatest pleasures in life is opening up the draw where I keep them. I even recently grouped them by UK region which is admittedly a bit worrying.
Spread an Ordnance Survey on the floor and the contours come alive, inviting you to start making squiggles and planning routes.
So in many ways, the planning of my Cape Wrath Trail route has been a huge pleasure. It has also made me realise that maps have become prohibitively expensive.
For the record, these are the Ordnance Survey maps you will require for the Cape Wrath Trail:
Explorer (1:25 000 scale): 391, 398, 413, 414, 433, 435, 439, 442, 445, 446
Landranger maps (1:50 000 scale): 9, 15, 16, 19, 20, 25, 33, 40, 41
Available form Amazon and Ordnance Survey direct. These days you can even buy expensive laminated versions that don’t turn to mulch in the teeth of a howling storm.
I’ve ended up buying pretty much the lot which is clearly unnecessary, especially as there are some where the route only strays onto them for a few km. My suggestion for normal people in this case would be to use the OS Getamap service then screengrab the relevant bits to print out.
Also, you only really need the detail of the 1:25 000 Explorer maps on some of the remotest sections.
I’m sure this contravenes copyright but there are a lot of people peeved with the amount OS charges for what is basically public data paid for by the UK taxpayer. I’m not going into that here, but you can read more about the campaign to free OS map data if you’re interested.
To reduce weight I’ll probably end up photocopying and laminating sections of the maps to take with me. You could achieve the same result (and probably save a lot of money) by using an online mapping programme like Memory Map. You can event print onto Toughprint paper which is waterproof - nice.
Unfortunately none of these programmes support macs, and during a recent attempt to install Windoze on my Intel mac mini, the machine rejected it like a bad kidney, requiring a trip to those nice people at the Apple store.
So I’ve learnt my lesson and it’s back to paper maps spread wide of the living room carpet.
