About Powys Walks
This is a free library of walking routes across Powys, put together by Cambria Sports Culture CIC. There is nothing to sign up for, no advertising, no app to buy and no premium tier. It is 102 walks, a map for each, and the practical detail you need to decide whether a route suits you today.
Powys is the largest county in Wales and one of the least densely populated places in Britain. It has more than twelve thousand public rights of way. Most people who live here walk the same three routes near their house because finding anything else takes more effort than the walk itself. That is the problem this site exists to solve.
Who makes it
Cambria Sports Culture is a community interest company, which means it is a business that is legally locked to a social purpose: any profit goes back into the work rather than to shareholders. We run guided group walks across the county, and this site grew out of being asked the same question over and over, which was some version of "where else can I go?"
How to read a walk page
Every walk opens with a strip of numbers. Distance is given in both miles and kilometres. Time is walking time at an unhurried pace and does not include stopping for lunch, taking photographs or standing about looking at the view, all of which you should do. Ascent is total climb, which matters far more than distance for how tired you will be.
Then there are five sections. Where it is gives you the map. The route describes where the walk goes and what shape it takes. Worth knowing is the specific, practical stuff: whether the pub actually opens, where the mud is, which month the waterfall is worth seeing. What you’ll see and Background are there because knowing what you are looking at makes a walk better.
Down the side you get how to get there, where to park, whether a bus goes, what the ground is like, how many gates and stiles, whether dogs and pushchairs are realistic, and whether there is a lavatory and a cup of tea at the end.
The difficulty grades, in plain terms
Easy. Surfaced or level ground, no navigation required, trainers are fine. Most people in reasonable health can do these without thinking about it. Several are usable with a wheelchair or a pushchair, and those are marked.
Moderate. Field paths and tracks, some climbing, gates and stiles. Boots make sense. You will know you have been for a walk.
Demanding. Sustained climbing, rough or wet ground underfoot, often open hillside where you need to be able to find your way if the weather closes in. Proper boots, waterproofs, food and water.
Strenuous. Mountain walking. Serious ascent, exposure to weather, long stretches with no shelter and no phone signal. Do not attempt these in poor visibility unless you can navigate with a map and compass. This grade is not a challenge rating, it is a warning.
Putting this on your phone
Signal across most of Powys is somewhere between poor and absent. So this site can be installed on a phone like an app and then used with no connection at all. You do not need an app store and it does not cost anything.
On an iPhone: open this site in Safari, tap the share button at the bottom of the screen (the square with an arrow coming out of it), scroll down and tap Add to Home Screen.
On an Android phone: open this site in Chrome, tap the three dots at the top right, then Install app or Add to Home screen.
Either way you get an icon on your home screen that opens straight into the walks. Then, while you still have signal, go to the walks page and tap Save all walks. It downloads every walk on the site, about three megabytes, and takes under a minute on a decent connection. After that every walk page works with the phone in aeroplane mode.
One honest limitation. Maps are made of tiles served from someone else’s computer, and downloading enough of them to cover Powys would be hundreds of megabytes and against the terms we use them under. So the site keeps the map tiles you have actually looked at. In practice that means if you open a walk at home the night before, its map will be there on the hill. If you open a walk for the first time with no signal, you get the text, the facts and the tips, but a blank grey square where the map should be.
Which is one more reason to carry the paper map.
Printing
Every walk page is set up to print onto a single sheet of A4, with the navigation, buttons and map controls stripped out. Use the print button on any walk, or your browser’s own print command. A sheet of paper in a pocket does not run out of battery, does not need a signal, and can be handed to somebody else.
Why there are no step-by-step directions
You will notice that no walk here says "go through the gate and bear left at the third stile". That is a deliberate decision and not an oversight.
Directions like that are only true on the day somebody wrote them. Stiles rot and get replaced with gates. Paths get legally diverted around new buildings. Waymarker discs come off gateposts. Fields get amalgamated and hedges taken out. A confident instruction that no longer matches the ground in front of you is genuinely dangerous on a hillside in bad light, and far worse than having no instruction at all, because it makes you doubt the map instead of the page.
So what you get instead is an outline of where the route goes, a map, and the practical warnings. Combined with the relevant OS Explorer sheet that is more useful, more honest, and it does not decay. It also means this site does not need constant revision to stay safe, which for a small organisation matters a great deal.
Helping out
If you find a blocked path, a broken stile or a missing waymarker, report it to Powys County Council. They are legally responsible for keeping rights of way open and they genuinely cannot fix what nobody tells them about. On the quieter paths in this county you may be the only person to notice for months.
If something on this site is wrong, tell us and we will change it. If you have photographs of any of these walks and are happy for them to be used here, we would like them. And if you want to walk with other people rather than alone, come on one of the guided walks.