iWalk Cornwall

You might have noticed that the natural history information in the iWalk Cornwall app is not only relevant to where you are on the walk but also what time of the year you are there.   If you've done some walks in May you might have noticed some wild garlic and bluebell facts.  Now these plants are dying back, the facts in the walks have now been replaced by other things, which may themselves change again later in the year. As we go back to re-check the walks, we're continually adding more seasonal layers so the richness and subtlety will continue to increase over time, even for walks you bought several years ago.  We're also learning about new things all the time ourselves so we'll be sharing this within the walks. Also to help with planning a walk for a different time of the year (e.g. for a holiday) or to just find out more about the natural history, there's an option on the settings screen to display the points of interest for all seasons.  This will then sho...

Cornwall Council have collaborated with us to get a grant to procure and install some new footpath signs and waymark posts for some of the inland paths connecting to the coast path used by our routes. Obviously there are still a lot more footpath signs on the inland paths in need of replacement but it's a positive step in the right direction. The new signs/posts are hardwood so they should last a bit longer than the ones they have replaced. They are now in place on the following walks: Port Quin to Port Isaac Mount Edgcumbe to Kingsand Sennen Cove to Land's End Mevagissey to Portmellon Widemouth to Bude Mousehole to Lamorna Cove

A question we often get asked is whether it's possible to start a circular walk from a location part-way round the route with the app. The answer is yes. When you first reach a direction point on the route, the app will offer to navigate from here. You can then follow the walk until you reach what is normally the end of the route. Once you reach the normal end of the walk, make your way to direction 1 (note that in some cases e.g. where there is only one way out of the car park, the start/end of the walk and direction 1 will be in the same place so this step won't apply). Tip: This is most easily done with the help of the map screen as the hand-written wording for the last direction will be based on how to get back to your car to end the walk at the normal location, not how to get to direction 1. Once you reach direction 1, the app should detect that you didn't start at the beginning and offer to continue the walk from direction 1. You can then continue using t...

On the "More options" menu of the app, there's a "Check for walk updates" option and on the home screen of the app there's a "Restore purchases" button. As they are fairly similar, you may wonder what the difference is. Each has a subtly different purpose. "Check for walk updates" is normally the one you want. It will check: For any walks purchased on another device on the same platform into the same Apple ID (Apple) or Google Account (Android) For any purchases from this device delayed with Apple/Google that haven't been delivered to the app yet For each of the walks in My Walks, whether any updates to the walk content are available "Restore purchases" is a belt-and-braces for things "check for walk updates" won't fix. It gets a list of everything from Apple or Google and then re-downloads all your walks in My Walk again, regardless of whether each is up-to-date.  If a walk gets corrupted on the device (e....

By using data about which walks have been downloaded, we've created a mechanism to help distribute people across our circular walks in Cornwall to assist with social distancing and footpath wear. We've done this by starting with a list of walks in generally quieter locations and then combining this with some automated spreading mechanisms so that there isn't a rush on a particular walk: The starting point is a list of walks which are off the beaten track These are shuffled into a different random order for every person to reduce the chances of any flocking on any one walk Anything that starts to float up into the most downloaded walks over the last 7 days is automatically removed from the list until it quietens down It's also worth noting that the circular routes are written in a single direction only so the chances of meeting people walking in the opposite direction is minimised. Note that being in rural locations: from June onwards, the footpaths may get overgrow...

Most of the iWalk Cornwall routes are between 4-6 miles which very roughly corresponds to 2-4 hours walking time.  This can either be done as a half-day walk, or as a longer day out with time left over to explore beaches and stop for a meal in a café etc.   To support walks longer than this, on the information page about each walk within the "Walks shop" section of the app, many of the walks have an "Adjoining walks" section. This allows a more demanding walk to be planned by stitching 2 of the normal circular routes together to make a longer figure-of-8 walk.  Here are some tips for how you can use the app to do this: Just before you approach the point where the 2 routes join, exit the first walk and load up the second. This will gives the app chance to track you approaching the direction point on the second walk, and it will start recording progress for the second walk.    If the first walk meets the second walk part-way around:  once you...

To add to the shorter and easier walks list  already in the app, we've also started collecting  an additional list of short-cuttable walks  (just over 50 so far) that can either:  be cut down from their normal length into a shorter circular walk be split into 2 separate shorter circular walks As well as providing lots more 2 and 3 mile walks, these also include some 1-2 mile walks that are even shorter than our shortest full walks.   The list includes some information on where to split or cut down each walk where it's not obvious.  We'll gradually add more walks to the list as we spot more opportunities. Below are some tips for shortcutting using the app... Ignore off-route app warnings whilst shortcutting One of the features of the app is that when you depart from the (normal) route, it will warn you.  It doesn't know about the shortcuts you will be taking in these cases so it will warn you once you depart the main route.  Since you know wh...

The iWalk Cornwall app offers a few different ways to access points of interest along the walk.  Any information for the current direction is shown on the direction overlay on the map screen. This is shown by default for all directions on the directions screen. You can turn this on and off using the setting screen (access via "... More", "Options" then "Settings"): Geo-located points of interest are shown as markers on the map.  Some of these may be in addition to those shown within the directions. You can tap these to read about them: When we check the routes, we're constantly on the lookout for more that we can add to each of the walks so you may well find we've added a few more points of interest if you come back to do a walk again.

Over a tonne of fishing gear is abandoned in the sea every MINUTE, on average.  Work is being done to change the economics to stop gear being dumped but the sea is already full of the stuff. Every year this kills over 100,000 whales, dolphins and turtles as well as countless seabirds.  It is also estimated to be destroying around 10% of the total commercial fish stocks. You can help tackle this by keeping a lookout on your walks The Polzeath Marine Conservation Group have come up with a good idea to get people doing coastal walks to act as an Early Warning System for this “ghost gear” so it can be removed as quickly as possible before it has chance to do any more harm. If you come across a small amount of fishing gear on a beach that's safe to remove then bin it.   If you spot some that's too large to deal with yourself then take a photo and email it to sue@cornwallsealgroup.co.uk , describing where it is and giving an idea of size.

The reason is that using GPS to measure distance always over-estimates. In other words: your GPS is wrong . Why?  There is an inaccuracy of several metres in each GPS reading on consumer devices due to radio waves being slowed down in the atmosphere. image from thesciencegeek.org This is the reason that councils don't use fitness apps to drill next to gas pipes in roads and instead have people holding something resembling a flying saucer on a pole having paid tens of thousands of pounds to subscribe to error correction services which reduce the error down to centimetres.   Surely a few metres isn't very far on a walk?  No, but it IS between readings. As the measurements are taken frequently during a walk (e.g. an app might get one reading per second), the error in position is significant vs the distance you have walked in the time between readings. In a car where you are going faster or even if you are running, the error is less significant vs the d...

We'll be there d'reckly! The length unit of “a league” was based on the distance that a person could walk in an hour. This was eventually standardised to be 3 (English) miles. Cornwall had its own distance units: a Cornish mile was 1½ English miles, which perhaps explains why arrival was always "d'reckly". How fast do people normally walk? On the flat, 3 miles/hour is a pretty typical walking speed, although on “proper” Cornish terrain, it’s likely to be closer to 2. When I’m testing walks, I usually average around 2-2½ miles per hour which includes a little bit of time spent taking photos and figuring out how best to describe the directions. Getting tired... Where possible, the iWalk Cornwall walks are designed so that the most demanding terrain is in the first half of the walk whilst you're bright-eyed and bushy-tailed and the return route is on easier terrain as you start to tire. This also has the effect of smoothing out the average speed...

For dog owners, we've added to the website: a list of walks where stiles have been reported to us as OK for larger dogs a list of walks with a low chance of encountering livestock   These are also linked from the dogs page -  http://www.iwalkcornwall.co.uk/dogs.html The "dogs" section of each walk also contains more information about stiles, livestock and any dog restrictions affecting the walk or beaches that it visits. We'll gradually add more walks over time and keep them updated based on feedback so let us know how you find the stiles if you take a large dog on one of our walks that currently doesn't have any info about stiles in the "dogs" box.

If you see something on your walk and want to snap a quick photo, rather than firing up the phone's camera app, within the iWalk app you can simply tap on "..." and then "Camera" to take a quick photo. This uses functionality built into iOS and Android but it's worth noting that for some unfathomable reason, Apple and Google have chosen to make this work very slightly differently to the camera app that they also supply on the phone, bless them. On iPhones, you need to press "Use Photo" after you have taken your photo: Apple On Android, you need to press "OK" or the tick icon, depending on your phone - some form of confirmation anyway!   NB. If you press the phone's back button, the photo will NOT be saved!!! Android Note that on old versions of Android (5 and below) the photos are stored in a subfolder within the gallery.

If you haven't heard of sweatcoin, it's a digital currency unit (a bit like a bitcoin) created by a British company and is generated via an app which counts steps when you are outside (doesn't work inside). https://www.digitaltrends.com/outdoors/sweatcoin-fitness-app/ The sweatcoin app pays a rough rate of one sweatcoin for each half mile walked (0.95 sweatcoins per 1000 verified steps).  These can then be spent on products and services through their app/website. Like bitcoin this is a "cryptocurrency" and can also be converted to cash.  Currently 1 sweatcoin is only worth 5p if you cash in 20,000 of them via Paypal!  However there are plans to trade it on currency exchanges and as with bitcoin, it's quite possible that sweatcoins could appreciate in value so it's no bad thing to be an early adopter.  The sweatcoin company have just landed £4 million in investment so it all looks fairly promising. You can run the sweatcoin app in the backgro...

An obvious concern with using any electronic device for satellite navigation is the lifetime of the battery, particularly given the high amplification levels needed to use weak GPS signals from space. For mobile phones, there is a cheap solution:  USB "power bank" (external batteries) can be purchased for as little as £5 and are small enough to slip in a pocket. Even the cheapest ones should last a walk but for around £20 you can get something that has many times the capacity of the phone's internal battery (over ten times that of the iPhone 6 battery, for example) so with those you really can walk all day long and probably all night (some include a torch!).   The flat ones are convenient as a phone can sit on the top and be secured by a couple of elastic bands! Amazon category: portable power banks Battery monitoring in the iWalk app During the walk, the iWalk app will monitor how fast your battery is draining and estimate how quickly you are likely to finish t...