About Wales Walks

This started as a much smaller thing. Cambria Sports Culture CIC runs guided group walks in Powys, and the same question kept coming up afterwards: where else can I go? So we put together a set of routes for the county as part of a funded project, and that was meant to be that.

It didn’t stay that way. Once the Powys walks were written it was obvious the rest of Wales had the same problem and nobody was solving it either. Plenty of walks exist online. Most of them sit behind a sign-up, or an app, or a wall of adverts, or they cover one county and stop dead at the boundary. So we kept going.

There are now 719 walks here, covering the whole country.

None of it is scraped. Every walk is a separate entry, researched and checked one at a time against what the landowners, the national parks and Natural Resources Wales actually publish. Nothing has been padded out to reach a round number. If a walk is here, it is because there is something specific worth saying about it.

Some of it will still be wrong, and there is a note at the bottom of this page about that.

What it costs

Nothing, and there is no catch buried in that.

No sign-up. No adverts. No subscription, no premium tier, no app to buy. We don’t set cookies, we don’t run analytics, and we don’t load anything from anyone else’s servers, so there is no third party watching either. We collect nothing about you because we have not built anything capable of collecting it.

You can check that yourself. Open the developer tools in your browser and watch the network tab. Nothing goes out.

What the grades mean

Four of them, and they are about effort rather than danger.

Easy means flat or nearly so, on good ground, and short. Under 80 metres of climbing and under six kilometres. Most people can do these in trainers.

Moderate means a climb you will notice, or enough distance to want proper footwear, or ground that gets muddy. Nothing technical.

Demanding means sustained climbing, rough or wet ground, and a walk you should set aside most of a morning for. Boots.

Strenuous means a mountain day. Serious ascent, exposed ground, no shelter, and weather that can change on you. Take a map, a compass and the ability to use them, spare layers and food. If you are not sure whether that is you, it probably is not, and there are 700 other walks on this site.

The grade assumes decent conditions. In snow, ice or high wind every walk here moves up at least one grade, and some become inadvisable.

It works without a signal

Signal across most of upland Wales is somewhere between poor and absent, which is a problem for a website you might want to read at a trailhead. So this one installs itself.

Visit it once with a connection and the pages you have looked at stay on your phone. To keep it properly: on an iPhone, tap the share button in Safari and choose Add to Home Screen. On Android, open the browser menu and choose Install app. It then opens like an app, because functionally it is one.

One honest limitation. The written content, the numbers and the layout all work offline. The map tiles do not, because they come from an external map service and downloading enough of them to cover Wales would be many gigabytes. If you open a walk page with no signal you will get everything except the map, which will be a blank grey square. That is why we keep saying to carry a paper map.

Both languages, properly

The site is bilingual, not translated-by-machine bilingual. Welsh sits at /cy/ with its own pages, its own URLs and its own search presence. Where a walk has not been translated yet the page says so plainly rather than quietly serving you English and hoping you don’t notice.

Why there are no turn-by-turn directions

This is the decision people ask about most, so it is worth being clear.

Every walk here gives you a general route, the distance, the ascent, the terrain, the parking, and a map. What it does not give you is a numbered list of instructions telling you to turn left at the third stile.

Directions go stale. Gates get moved, waymarks come down, paths get diverted round a new fence, a stile rots and is replaced by a gap in a different hedge. A route description written three years ago and never walked since is worse than nothing, because it reads with the same confidence as one written yesterday. On a hillside in November that is not a small problem.

So we tell you what the walk is and let the map do the navigating. Take an OS Explorer sheet for the area, or the OS app, and use this alongside it.

Who made it

Cambria Sports Culture CIC, a community interest company based in Powys. We run guided walks, and this is the thing we point people at when they ask what to do the rest of the week. It is paid for out of what we do, not out of your attention.

More about Cambria Sports Culture CIC

Corrections

Some of this will be wrong. Car parks close, pubs shut, paths get diverted. If you find something out of date, tell us and we will fix it.