Читать книгу Not the West Highland Way. Diversions over mountains, smaller hills or high passes for 8 of the WH Way's 9 stages онлайн

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Second best is still more than good enough. The Ordnance Survey’s Landranger series at 1:50,000 covers the whole area, and indeed the whole of the UK. It is well surveyed, clear and easy to read. It has two minor drawbacks. Even on a brand new map, the information on forestry plantations and forest roads is liable to be a decade or two out of date. And the footpaths marked are proscriptive rather than descriptive, which is a fancy way of saying they mark paths that ought (for historical or other reasons) to exist, rather than the ones that actually do. Sheets 64 (Glasgow), 56 (Loch Lomond), 50 (Glen Orchy) and 41 (Ben Nevis) cover the ground – almost. You need Sheet 57 (Stirling) for Drymen on the WH Way, but not for any of the ‘Not the WH Way’ routes. And the Rannoch crossing (Route 21) requires Sheet 42 (Glen Garry) as well as Sheet 41.

For exploration of crags and corries and pathless boulder slopes, you would be helped by the extra contour detail at 1:25,000 scale. The routes in this book don’t require this extra bulk and expense. However, for those who insist that bigger is invariably better, there is the 1:25,000 Explorer series of the Ordnance Survey. This is excellent mapping apart from the fact that many of the summits are so obscured with crag-marks that the contour detail is almost illegible. If you’re prepared to pay extra for a map that’s printed on waterproof paper, and marks paths where they actually are, most (but not all) of the routes are on various 1:25,000 Superwalker sheets from Harveys.