We are delighted to announce a new project making it easy for volunteers to develop and share their favourite walking routes online, giving them the opportunity to share the joys of walking with a wide range of people, including potential members.
While many Ramblers members are happy to pick up a map and plan a walking route themselves, most people would prefer someone else to do it for them. Not everyone has the ability or the inclination to plan a walking route that suits their needs, and many people say they could walk more if they had more information about the best places to walk, either in their immediate area or further afield.
For many decades Ramblers volunteers alongside many others have produced printed books and leaflets, and recently a few websites, to meet this demand, but you only have to look at the number of websites that now offer walking routes to appreciate the importance of walking route information. Over the past few years the Ramblers has been providing routes centrally in a modest way through walk, walk BRITAIN, walkmag.co,uk and Get Walking Keep Walking, and they have proved very popular. A recent survey of walk readers showed that routes were the section that most people turned to first.
The new system will make it much easier for volunteers to upload and share routes, and also ensure those routes are of good enough quality to merit the approval of the Ramblers, Britain's walking charity and the established experts on walking.
It will be introduced in several phases. At first the system will provide a means for volunteers to develop and store routes online so that they can be printed off for your own use and shared with friends and family or with walkers on a led walk. This system is already in operation within the Get Walking Keep Walking projects, which has its own trained volunteers developing customised short routes for project participants -- something that has proved a key strength to its success in introducing inactive people to their local walking environment.
From October 2011 we will be opening up this Walking Routes system more widely to Ramblers volunteers, who will be able to sign up and undertake some simple online training covering the principals of developing good routes and how to use the system. They will also be able to check routes uploaded by others, on the principal that a route isn't circulated until another volunteer signed up to the system has checked and assessed it. A regular cycle of checking will be built in to ensure routes are kept up to date.
During 2012, as part of a major web development project, these high quality routes developed by accredited Ramblers volunteers will be available to members and the public on a new Ramblers website. They will be easily searchable so that people can easily find a route that suits them – whether that’s something short or long, rural or urban, challenging or pushchair friendly walk.
With the enthusiasm and expertise of Ramblers volunteers and the training, accreditation and checking process, we believe that the Ramblers' Walking Routes system will quickly become recognised as offering Britain's best walking routes. We will also be working to integrate it with other systems like the longstanding Group Walks Finder, so for example someone downloading a route might also be alerted if a led walk is taking place along it.
The development of the system has been funded by the Big Lottery Fund and Ramblers Holiday Charitable Trust as part of the Get Walking Keep Walking project, and is a great example of how funded projects of this kind help support the Ramblers more generally. It truly will be a resource for everyone – no matter where you live or walk in Britain and the kinds of walks you and your Groups enjoy.
The current system will be demonstrated at General Council on 16-17 April and at the two Getting People Workshops in Newcastle and London on 7-8 May. To book your place at these workshops see here.
For further news, watch this space and our newsletter for walk leaders, the Leader Column.
Special thanks to the volunteers who helped develop the system: Brian Hunt, David Thompson, Elizabeth Heverin, Gillian Salmon, Kate Harding and Kate Roome.
Update, 19 July 2011. The date for opening up the system more widely to Ramblers volunteers has been delayed due to development taking longer than originally estimated. We are hopeful that volunteers can start using the system in March 2012.
