How to Read a Map and Compass on Moorland Walks

Why moorland rewards a map and compass

Open moorland has a habit of removing the things we normally navigate by. The path fades into a smear of trodden grass, the wall you were following stops at a corner, and every rise looks like the one before it. Add a bit of cloud and drizzle and you can pass within fifty metres of a junction without ever knowing it was there.

This is why moorland walking leans on three simple skills: relating contour lines to the ground under your boots, walking on a compass bearing, and pacing. None of them is difficult. All of them need practice somewhere benign before you need them in earnest.

What the contours are telling you

Most British hill maps, including the 1:25,000 hill series, use a ten-metre contour interval. So every line you cross going uphill is ten metres of climb, and five lines is fifty. That single number is the most useful thing on the whole sheet.

• Contours packed tightly: steep ground. Very tight, and it's a scarp or crag to walk around rather than up.
• Contours widely spaced: gentle ground where you'll cover distance quickly.
• A V pointing uphill: a re-entrant — a stream-cut gully, usually wet and peaty underfoot.
• A V pointing downhill: a spur or nose of high ground, often the driest and easiest line to walk.
• A ring of contours closing on itself: a summit or knoll — or a hollow, depending on which way the ground falls inside it.

Before you set off, pick three or four features you expect to meet: the spur you'll contour round, the re-entrant the path should cross, the point where the ground flattens on the shoulder. Then, out on the hill, look up and ask whether you're actually standing where you think you are. Matching map to ground, and ground to map, beats staring at paper.

Taking a bearing that works

To walk from where you are to a feature you can see on the map but not on the ground, lay the long edge of the compass baseplate between the two points, with the direction-of-travel arrow pointing at your target. Rotate the housing until the orienting lines run parallel with the map's grid lines and the orienting arrow points to the top of the map.

Now correct for the difference between grid north and magnetic north. In Britain this gap is small — a couple of degrees or less in most places — but it varies by region and changes over time, so read the margin notes and the date printed alongside them. If the correction is, say, two degrees west, add two degrees to your bearing.

On the ground, hold the compass flat at waist height and turn your whole body until the red needle sits neatly inside the red orienting arrow. The direction-of-travel arrow now points your way. Don't walk watching the needle — pick a distinct boulder, peat hag or rock outcrop on the line, walk to it, then take a fresh sighting.

Pacing and timing: honest numbers

Know your own pace. On a measured hundred-metre stretch, count every time your left foot lands. A typical adult on flat, firm ground takes roughly 60 to 70 of these double paces. On tussocky moorland, in bog, or going uphill, that drops to 75 or 80 — and into a headwind with a heavy pack it can be more.

For timing, allow around fifteen minutes per kilometre on the flat, which is a steady four kilometres an hour. Then add roughly a minute for every ten metres of ascent. A four-kilometre leg with two hundred metres of climbing gives you an hour plus twenty minutes, so about eighty minutes. Wind, heather and wet ground all slow you down, so add a third on a rough day.

Count in blocks of a hundred double paces, using pebbles moved pocket to pocket or a tally counter, so you always know how far along the leg you are.

Checks, handrails and catching features

Aiming off is the neatest trick on the moor. If your target is a small feature sitting on a line — a bridge, a col, a stile in a wall — deliberately walk a few degrees to one side of it. When you meet the line, you know which way to turn.

Handrails are linear features to follow or run parallel to: a wall, a stream, a fenceline, the edge of a plantation. A catching feature is something beyond your target that will stop you if you overshoot — a big gully, a track, a loch shore. Used together, they turn a bare hillside into a series of manageable steps.

Check every ten or fifteen minutes: pace count, bearing, and one identifiable feature you can see and point to on the map. If any two of those three disagree, stop, eat something, put your hood up and re-locate before you walk another step.

Kit and habits that keep you right

• A baseplate compass with a rotating housing, kept on a lanyard round your neck rather than buried in the pack.
• A map in a clear case, folded to the section you're actually walking.
• A pencil and a spare, for scribbling bearings and timings in the margin.
• Pace beads or a tally counter for long legs across featureless ground.
• A headtorch — moorland legs take longer than flat-distance sums suggest.

Leave a route card with someone at home, and treat a phone or GPS as a backup rather than a plan. Batteries fade quickly in the cold; a paper map doesn't. Practise these skills on a familiar hill in fair weather, and they'll carry you comfortably through the clag when it matters.