Volunteers map 10,000 routes in Great Britain to help make walking accessible | Walking

The volunteers have mapped 10,000 walking routes through Great Britain to try to make rural walking more accessible.

The routes offer accessible and picturesque walks for people with disabilities, parents with children and the elderly, according to Slow Ways, the campaign group behind the project.

The group does research and maps of these walking routes since 2020 and has now made them available on a dedicated website and application.

Daniel Raven-Ellison, managing director and founder of Slow Ways, said: “For millions of people, these routes give psychological security and the confidence that they would not have had otherwise. They do not want to take the risk of not knowing if an itinerary suits them, or if it is something they will appreciate. ”

The new application will include 7,699 routes in England, 1,510 in Wales and 854 in Scotland, giving users 112,000 miles of walks to choose.

Raven-Ellison, who was previously professor of geography, said that popular applications such as Google Maps and Apple Maps “do not give information on the reasons why the route is good or what it will look like.”

On the other hand, the slow means “can say if they are accessible in a wheelchair, if there will be animals along the route, and if it will keep your white and clean shoes”.

He said the initiative was an act of citizen and “entirely democratic” geography. Volunteers across the country have collected data on the quality of the routes and made suggestions on how they could be made more accessible, which a group of panelists then examined.

Raven-Ellison said that a big problem to which British walking networks were “that there is too much negligence and proliferation, which makes routes even more inaccessible”.

He encouraged people to walk along the routes for fun, which would indirectly help maintain the environment.

“Usually, an underused route does not take care of properly because people feel disconnected. When people use these routes more frequently and get a closer link with the nature around it, they will be more attentive to deal with them,” he said.