PENNINE WAY VOTED BEST PLACE TO WALK

10 March 2010, 9:04am

ViewRanger launches Great Trail series for off road sat nav

The Pennine Way has topped a list of the nations favourite walks, so ViewRanger has made it the first in its new series of Great Trails.

These aim to provide all the mapping needed for long-distance walks in a neat package that turns your mobile phone into a fully featured off-road sat nav.

In partnership with ViewRanger, readers of regional lifestyle magazines were invited to vote for their favourite places to walk and the results were diverse. The top six were the Pennine Way, the South West Coastal Path, the South Downs, the Lake District, the Cotswold Way and the West Highlands Way.

Craig Wareham, CEO of Augmentra, the company behind ViewRanger, has responded to this feedback.

The contributors to this survey were not necessarily hardcore outdoor enthusiasts, and we saw that people were probably doing the long-distance walks in stages, perhaps a bit each weekend. To help, we decided to package all the maps they would need within a Great Trails series. This would allow weekend walkers to use their phone as an off-road sat nav to find interesting walks along the route and find a good pub for lunch.

ViewRanger offers more than just map display. It is interactive allowing a route to be overlaid and show your location, and uses GPS to let you know when you go off course. There is a unique panoramic feature to help identify points of interest in the landscape and a built-in sports computer to tell you speed and distance travelled.

ViewRanger already offers high resolution 1:25k scale Ordnance Survey mapping for the whole of Great Britain and all the national parks, including the South Downs and the Lake District. It is also possible to purchase individual map tiles over the air for specific areas.

ViewRanger is the first to offer mapping for an entire National Trail,available for a mobile phone.

Each Great Trails package includes highly detailed digital OS Explorer mapping covering the area around the trail. ViewRanger is robust, easy to use and runs on a wide range of mobile phones. Even Search and Rescue teams use it as a more flexible alternative to standalone GPS equipment.

Thousands of people walk the Pennine Way each year, especially between May and September when the weather is at its best, continues Craig.

But conditions can change quickly in the mountains and the trail can be hard to find in some areas. ViewRangers overlaid route makes it easy to see if you are straying from the path and because all the mapping is included, theres no need to buy a stack of paper maps.

But perhaps the best feature is the BuddyBeacon. You can see the positions of your fellow-walkers if you get split up, and friends and family at home can also see your location via a secure web portal, which is really important for safety and peace-of-mind.

The Pennine Way stretches 268 miles from Edale in the Peak District to Kirk Yetholm in the Scottish Borders. It passes through three national parks the Peak District, the Yorkshire Dales, and Northumberland National Park and takes in a range of breathtaking scenery including heathlands, limestone karst, cliffs, caves and waterfalls. Lush green valleys such as Swaledale are contrasted with the high peaks, and there are archaeological and industrial remains scattered along the route.

Walkers also have the opportunity to stop for a drink at the highest pub in Great Britain, the Tan Hill Inn, 528m above sea level!

ViewRanger National Trail Pennine Way is available as a download, on CD-ROM or Memory-Card and costs £60. Wainwrights Coast-to-Coast walk, which traverses Cumbria, the Yorkshire Dales and the North York Moors, is also available, and more Great Trails are being added to the series.

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