OS Tour Maps

[pidgin08]

Just spotted the OS Tour maps on the OS website - pretty cheap at a decent sounding scale 1:100,000 - 1:130,000 for the area I'm interested in (Devon and Cornwall)
Apologies if this has been asked before - did a forum search but couldn't find anything...
Anyone had any experience of these - both as a sole means of navigation and in conjunction with a GPS for planning routes etc?

thanks,
Alex

 

[pshore]

Kind of depends. :-)

The blue ones, if that's what you mean ....

Advantage: Easy to read; pubs and some campsites marked; Some but not all (?) have the national cycle network marked.
Disadvantage: Contours are not marked which might be a big issue. Coverage is small, you might need quite a few on a longer tour.

I have also used the road/green ones to do the Long Las Cymru. All of Wales on one map. I found this map was very good. A fellow traveller had the 1:25k maps and there was too much detail to get a sense of how far you were along your chosen route.

Adv: It has contours/hill shading; same set of campsites as on the blue ones. Pubs, maybe but I can't remember. Cheap enough to take a hi-lighter pen to it.
Disadv: Scale can make it difficult to read. Perhaps not enough details lif you are really out in the sticks (I don't tend to mind as if you get lost you find a local a strike up a conversation).

I prefer the green maps for planning and overview then combine with a GPS running the OpenCycleMap.

Phil.

 

[rualexander]

I prefer the green maps for planning and overview then combine with a GPS running the OpenCycleMap.

Phil.

Unfortunately those 'green maps' are no longer in production and are hard to get hold of, but they are available in digital form to download free of charge from Ordnance Survey here , just select the 1:250,000 scale colour raster option and it will download the whole of the UK to your computer, its split up into about 60 separate 'pages' in the form of TIFF files.

 

[pshore]

That's a shame. I presume they are no longer being updated then. That at least explains why they are not all on Amazon.

They've got a few at the local book shop, I'm gonna have to panic buy some for my future tours.

 

[rualexander]

That's a shame. I presume they are no longer being updated then. That at least explains why they are not all on Amazon.

They've got a few at the local book shop, I'm gonna have to panic buy some for my future tours.

The digital mapping will continue to be updated, I emailed the OS and asked them this a few months ago when I found out that they had discontinued the paper versions.