Plan on Paper Before You Pack

Most hill days are won or lost at the kitchen table, not on the hillside. An hour with a map, a pencil and a mug of tea will tell you whether your route fits the daylight, the weather and the legs of the slowest person in the group. Three skills do most of the heavy lifting: grid references for distance, contours for steepness, and handrails for everything in between.

Grid References Turn a Map Into Numbers

Every 1:25,000 and 1:50,000 map is sliced into kilometre squares by the grid. Read eastings first, then northings — along the corridor, then up the stairs. A four-figure reference such as NH 12 45 puts you in a 1km square; six figures, NH 123 456, narrows it to 100 metres; eight figures gets you down to 10 metres.

The real value is measurement. Once you know the scale, you can convert map distance to ground distance without guessing.

• On a 1:25,000 map, one grid square is 4cm across and 1cm equals 250m.
• On a 1:50,000 map, one square is 2cm and 1cm equals 500m.
• A romer on the baseplate of your compass subdivides a square to 100m with no arithmetic at all.

Break the route into straight legs along the paths you actually intend to use, and give each leg a six-figure reference at both ends. Add the legs together and you have a real distance, not an optimistic estimate based on the line a guidebook drew.

Contours Are a Cross-Section of the Hillside

Contours join points of equal height. They are normally drawn at 10-metre intervals, with every fifth line thickened — usually at 50-metre steps. Where the lines bunch together the ground is steep; where they spread apart you can relax and enjoy it.

Learn a few spacings and steepness becomes obvious at a glance. On a 1:25,000 map, two contours sitting a couple of millimetres apart mean roughly 1 in 5 — about 11 degrees, enough to slow a loaded group noticeably. Four millimetres apart is 1 in 10, comfortable walking. Lines almost touching, around a millimetre apart, give you something near 1 in 2.5, roughly 22 degrees: genuinely steep, sore on the calves and needing real care on wet grass or loose scree.

Shape matters as much as spacing. A slope that steepens towards the top, with contours closing as you climb, is convex — a shoulder. One that eases near the top is concave — a bowl, often wet underfoot. Where contours form a V pointing uphill you are looking at a re-entrant or gully, and water will be running down it. Where the V points downhill, you have a spur or ridge, and usually a drier, cleaner line of ascent.

Handrails: Let the Ground Navigate for You

A handrail is any linear feature you can follow — a wall, fence line, stream, forest edge, ridgeline or a path shown as a broken black line. Instead of marching on a bearing and counting paces across blank moorland, you follow something the map has already drawn for you.

Choose handrails that lead towards a catching feature: a track, a bridge, a plantation corner, a loch shore, a road. Even if you drift off line, the handrail keeps picking you up. Compass work then reduces to short, sharp legs between handrails, which is exactly the sort of navigation people do well in clag and driving rain.

Time It, Then Check It

Naismith's rule remains the fastest back-of-envelope timing tool: allow about 4–5km/h on level ground and add a minute for every 10 metres of ascent. Then adjust honestly. Add time for bog, tussock, boulder fields and steep descent, and add it for the slowest walker rather than the fittest.

• Write the route out as legs with grid references, distance, height gain and a time for each.
• Note an escape route and a safety bearing for every leg — usually downhill to a valley or across to a handrail.
• Identify the catching features you would meet if you overshot, and mark the points where you must turn back if the weather closes in.
• Check the last leg: is it the roughest ground of the day, tackled on the tiredest legs? If so, reorder the route.

A plan that reads well on paper — steady climbs, handrails for the fiddly sections, descents down spurs rather than into gullies — usually walks well on the day. It also leaves you free to enjoy the view instead of arguing with the map on a windy col.