I have long been interested in how walkers and navigators relate the real world in front of their eyes to the map. In particular I'm interested in how people figure out hill names. It's quite easy to work out the names of nearby surrounding hills with map alone. When they get a bit more complicated you can turn to the compass. But when you're dealing with distant peaks they're not even on the map!
And with really distant peaks you've gone earth curvature and refraction to worry about, which makes it even more difficult.
The best manual giving advice on how to figure out hill names I've found was written in French in 1951 by the famous cartographer Imhof. I'm wondering if any of the users here have any tips for navigation/map-reading texts that deal specifically with how you figure out the names of peaks from where you're stood on the hill. It seems that although most map reading chapters contain some content on matching map to ground and vice versa, it's more with a view to updating your position with various landmarks, and not necessarily from the point of view of identifying peak names. If anyone has stumbled across any good guides for this task I'd be very keen to hear.
If you don't know the area well then use a compass bearing and your best guess from what information you've got to hand, if there's anyone around who knows better then fine, go with what they say.
I remember my first fellwalk in the Lake District, when kids younger than me were calling out the names of all the fells, which were just nameless, shapeless bumps to me. I thought I'd never get the hang of it, but only a few months later, I'd cracked it.
I guess the information just seeps into my head while I'm using the map, and before I know it, previously unfamiliar landscapes just seem to fill up with placenames. You only need to know where two or three things are, and the rest should fall into place logically.
If something is off the edge of the map, just get a map that covers a bigger area. A roadmap is fine if you're trying to sort things out over a thousand square miles!
Interesting answers. I've tried Viewranger and I think it's really intriguing. There are a bunch of similar iphone apps as well that label peaks.
But going back to map and compass, in regions of complex terrain it's incredibly difficult to work out which areas of the map you can see, and which you can't. To some extent you're relying on contour interpretation skills, but there comes a point when even top notch contour reading skills still leave a large degree of ambiguity - for example, a small peak poking up behind a larger peak - can I identify that on the map? How sure can I be?
May I ask how many of you would feel comfortable going into say the Lake District (and imagine you didn't know any of the peaks to begin with, oh and you're not allowed a Wainwright guide either in this hypothetical example!) armed with map and compass. Do you think you'd be able to successfully identify ALL the peaks on the horizon? Or just the big ones, or the close ones? I'm keen to know how much it's possible, and therefore how much I need to improve my skills. Equally, if there's a point at which you give up and say it's impossible then I'm equally keen to know.
My feeling is there comes a point when, either due to distance or complexity of contours, it's no longer feasible to approach the problem with map and compass because any results become guesswork. The question is where that point is. For a beginner it'll be quite soon, for an expert, it'll be further down the line. I'm not quite sure where it'd be for me!
Interesting points from George - and it was exactly this question (and the inspiration of the Wainwright guides) that led us to start creating and experimenting way back in 2005 with some of the ideas behind what became ViewRanger.
Related to this, the University of Nottingham has done quite a bit of work on spatial awareness analysis in this area. They have a rather nice "immersive" visualization theatre that means you can virtually wander around the Lake District and carry out experiments on identification of features within the landscape. (Of course, not as fun as being *in* the Lake District!).
We worked with them, tying the ViewRanger Panorama into their visualization studio so that you could use ViewRanger to help identify the hill peaks seen on their visualization theatre - and then compare to people not using ViewRanger.
Since you seem to be worrying fractionally, whats important is where you are and where you're going Obviously useful to be able to read the shapes of relatively nearby hills off maps for that. Spotting ones in the far distance can certainly be fun but no more than that really.
Mostly it comes from walking in an area a fair bit. The lakes is really quite a small area overall so its not so hard to get an idea what many things are. The same with Snowdonia really. You just remember what things look like.
I'm not at all good in some bits of the Lakes. I certainly didn't know (or care!) precisely what half the bits I could see from Ulscarf/High Raise etc were last Autumn. Very jumbled that view.
> Do you think you'd be able to successfully identify ALL the peaks on the horizon?
No. And I can't say that I'll lose any sleep over it...
Relief/solar shaded maps make understanding the terrain much easier (for me). Whilst I can read contours, and get my head around the rough shape of the land, shading makes it almost intuitive.
I have better/more interesting things/more important things (like find my flask and butties, then sit down and enjoy the whole vista) than try to identify everything I can see...
I find the process of gradually getting to know an area rewarding, talking to people who know the place, comparing your photos to other references, memorising names, features, landmarks etc, just figuring it out really, after a while it all comes together and you get to that stage when you spy a hilltop in the distance and it's 'Aha, thats's Mount Whatever over there', quite satisfying.
I doubt there's any really good trick to instantly identify unfamiliar hills, just takes experience of the area and time.
So there I was... walking across Stainmore in good weather for a change... and in the distance I could see the smoky chimneys of Teesside and the outline of the North York Moors. Interesting... but of no practical benefit... given that they were half the width of Great Britain away. That's always the way it is with distant views!
Once, in the Lakes, on one of those rare days of exceptional visibility, we saw a hill that was obviously very far away. It was only just visible. We couldn't figure it out at all but we took a bearing on it and consulted the road atlas later and came to the conclusion it could only have been The Cheviot- a good 80 miles away. It made me wonder what is the furthest it is possible to see from a British hill?
Thanks for your responses everyone. It seems most walkers aren't too obsessed by the minutiae, but they like to know the 'big ones' or the 'conspicuous ones'.
Sam, you are dead right, The Cheviot is ~80 miles away and can be seen from Scafell Pike amongst other places. See this panorama by the renowned Chris Jesty: http://www.viewfinderpanoramas.org/panoramas/cjesty/scafellpike1.jpg Look on the horizon just to the right of Blencathra
The more I look into this, the more I see the importance of weather conditions: not just clarity and visibility, but also atmospheric refraction which depends on changes in air density with altitude. Refraction allows you to see 'further' than the curvature of the earth would normally let you observe. It stands to reason that refraction can be greater on some days than others, and it's most noticeable when features are close to the horizon. They say that when you see the sun set it's actually already set, geometrically speaking!?!
Oh, and here's a great site where you can submit your photos with gps location and their software will figure out your viewing direction and automatically annotate your panoramas - sweet! http://tev.fbk.eu/marmota/eagleeye/
An intruguing quote from one of the sources above:
"British Isles The longest theoretical line of sight in the British Isles is 144 miles (232 km) from Merrick, in the southern uplands of Scotland, to Snowdon in North Wales. I have found no longer sightlines, and none were found in a study by topographic researcher Chris Jesty in the 1980's. A 1990's Guinness Book of Records published this superlative, but gave the distance as 144 km (sic). Unlike the longer US views above, the line of sight is low altitude and passes primarily over the sea, so Snowdon would only be observable from Merrick on an exceptionally clear day. No sightings have come to my attention.
Merrick would be practically impossible to observe from Snowdon, because of the very thin aperture it shows behind nearby Lamachan hill. To give an analogy: if a colleague and I were in neighbouring rooms, and I were at a desk but the colleague were looking through an empty keyhole, he would probably see my clearly, but I would not see him. The "keyhole" is Lamachan Hill, which is much closer to Merrick, so an observer on Merrick would see Snowdon much more easily than vice versa. Infact, Merrick would be impossible to observe from Snowdon other than with a telescope, and then only if there were a suitable contrast with Lamachan Hill (e.g. snow or sun on one but not the other). That is why Merrick is not shown on the Snowdon panorama."
http://www.viewfinderpanoramas.org/panoramas.html#longlines (near bottom of page)
What a facinating link! Also glad to have confirmation that it was The Cheviot we saw that day. I think the best visibility we've ever had was one unforgettable occasion on Beinn an Dothaidh- I'm fairly confident we could see 100 miles that day. Blimey though- 144 miles is astounding!
It's amazing to think how far we can see. Don't forget to look up on a dark night - you can see a very long way into space!
I've heard that in the antarctic it's so incredibly clear that people (whose distance perception is finely tuned to their normal environment, ie UK) consistently underestimate how far away places are.
I've also heard an amusing story about a famous mountaineer from the Alps visiting a friend in Snowdonia. I can't remember where they were, but the friend, a local, proposed they ascend another summit before heading down off the hill. The Alps man was aghast, suggesting they'd never make it before sundown, and was evidently surprised when they reached the summit barely half an hour later. Sorry, I didn't tell it very well, but I'm guessing the alpine man was used to seeing distant hills in such clarity in the Alps that he overestimated similar looking scenes in Snowdonia. In some ways the inverse of the antarctic problem. I think it may have been in a Bonnington book of adventures.
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