The End to End Trail - Land’s End to John O’Groats

Guidebook outlining the 1935km (1200 mile) walk across Britain from Land’s End to John O’Groats, concentrating on the 'missing links' between the main long-distance trails covered in other guidebooks. The route is divided into 61 daily stages averaging just less than 32km (20 miles).

Ordnance Survey maps

With the possible exception of the South West Coast Path, neither this guidebook nor any other should be relied on without having relevant Ordnance Survey or equivalent maps with you as well. Guidebooks are fine while you are on the right path, but rarely give you the information you need to find it again when you have lost it. At least when you have a map and get lost, you are probably still on the map.

The relevant OS maps are listed in the Maps box at the beginning of each section, and under the heading Recommendations are my suggestions for what to actually take.

Strip maps

When some or all of the day’s walking is not covered by another guidebook, my own strip maps are provided (grouped together at the end of each section), annotated with useful information to help you to follow the route without going astray.

The strip maps are not intended to be a substitute for Ordnance Survey maps, however. There are no contours marked, so they do not show the lie of the land, and they only show the recommended route and a narrow strip on either side. The strip maps should be used alongside OS maps, and one way of doing this is to transfer the route onto your OS maps with a soft pencil (2B or 3B), which can easily be erased later.

Many walkers will be relieved to hear that all the maps are oriented with north at the top of the page. This makes navigation easier, and since the Trail is overall south to north, for quite a lot of the time you will be holding the book the right way up as you follow the route.
Each map page has a named start and end point, and these are intended to let you know approximately where the walking starts and ends on the page.  Not every page actually starts and ends exactly in a spot named on a map, so the name given reflects the nearest significant place with a name – this place could be just before or just after the actual page end point, or slightly off to the left or right.  The named location is usually shown on one or other of the map pages (before or after the page break), but not always.

The text on the maps is usually in a series of numbered paragraphs on each page, and each paragraph is as close as it can be to the part of the map it relates to. This means that when looking at the map pages, expect to start reading paragraph number 1 near the bottom. If there are a number of strips of the map on one page, where practical the first is lowest down, and the higher ones follow on.

Scale

The strip maps are on a scale of 1:25000 as far as the point where the Trail joins the Pennine Way, then at 1:50000 from the Scottish border onwards. The reason for using two different scales is that on a 1:50000 map it is almost impossible to show the detailed route-finding information needed to navigate intensive farming areas, such as you will meet in Somerset and Staffordshire. On the other hand, in the Highlands of Scotland there are generally far fewer features to show on a map, and using a 1:25000 scale would have resulted in many map sections showing nothing but a dotted line across a featureless page, which would be of little use for navigation.