Wainwright Guides Revised With GPS

The Lake District fells may, you think, have remained pretty much the same since Wainwright penned his legendary guidebooks, but you'd be wrong. Apparently hundreds of tiny details have altered since the man's guides were first published, and now something's being done about it.

Chris Jesty is painstakingly revising the entire series and has already made 3,000 hand-drawn changes to the first of the volumes, The Eastern Fells. According to an article in the Guardian, he used squares of graph paper to plot GPS data against Wainwright's original maps and uncover discrepancies.

In once case, the re-opening of a quarry on Consiton Old Man meant that the original Wainwright route was completely impassable for example, and on a lower level, large numbers of walls detailed in the original volumes have simply disappeared.

The first revised volume, A Pictorial Guide to the Lakeland Fells is published by Frances Lincoln priced at £12.99. You can read the full story on the Guardian web site.