Maps for Hebrides tour

Cycle-touring, Expeditions, Adventures, Major cycle routes NOT LeJoG (see other special board)
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dbennett1882
Posts: 28
Joined: 30 Mar 2014, 12:38am

Maps for Hebrides tour

Post by dbennett1882 »

I am at phase 1 of planning a tour of the Western Isles and have struggled to find a sensible map of the islands. The local bookshop has the OS maps but I would need to buy quite a few of these to cover the whole area. I think I would be getting maps with a lot of sea on them!
Ive searched for other maps but cannot find a touring map.
Does anybody have suggestions?
I have GPS and computer access to maps but want a map or two that I can take with me.
Thanks
Dave
gloomyandy
Posts: 1140
Joined: 16 Mar 2012, 10:46pm

Re: Maps for Hebrides tour

Post by gloomyandy »

There are not that many roads (unless you are doing off road routes), so I just visited a few pound shops and cheap book shops looking for a large scale road atlas and used pages taken from that. I think the one I ended up with was the Phillips Big Road Atlas of Britain. Check the scale of the maps for the Hebrides as a lot of them seemed to use a smaller scale for the islands! I've used this same map to tour the Outer Hebrides, Mull, Skye, Islay, Orkney and a few others now, just taking the bits I need! I do tend to have some higher res maps on my kindle but don't use them much.
largeallan
Posts: 339
Joined: 10 Jan 2010, 2:31pm
Location: Isle of Arran

Re: Maps for Hebrides tour

Post by largeallan »

https://wordery.com/cycling-in-the-hebr ... GwodnOkIJQ

I've just recently toured the islands and found more than enough info in this book.....the author is on this forum too and lives on Harris (I believe). There are so few roads that the wee maps in the book are all you really need for navigation purposes.
pal
Posts: 612
Joined: 22 Mar 2008, 11:49am

Re: Maps for Hebrides tour

Post by pal »

The Cicerone book is very good (though I found the vertical axis on its route profiles a bit alarmingly exaggerated! But I suppose better to find a hill is less steep in reality than the other way round...). I also used the Nicholson 1:250,000 map ('West Scotland and the Western Isles'), which gets (almost) everywhere on one sheet (it doesn't go as far south as Arran or the bottom half of the Kintyre peninsula); they do some 1:100,000 sheets of individual islands/groups of islands too: http://www.nicolsonmaps.com/acatalog/Nicolson-Maps.html
NickWi
Posts: 208
Joined: 28 Apr 2011, 8:14pm

Re: Maps for Hebrides tour

Post by NickWi »

I agree it's annoying buying a map which 2/3rds is sea, but I look at it that the cost of buying a few maps is tiny in comparison to the overall cost of the holiday. If it helps with the overall experience, and when I tour I'm a slow down and smell the roses sort of guy, then having detailed OS maps allows me to get more from the tour.

However if all your concern is how can I do the whole of the Hebrides in three days, the rip the pages out of a 1:250,000 road atlas and it'll tell you all you need.
dbennett1882
Posts: 28
Joined: 30 Mar 2014, 12:38am

Re: Maps for Hebrides tour

Post by dbennett1882 »

Thanks everybody
thats given me plenty of leads to get started
much appreciated
Dave
gloomyandy
Posts: 1140
Joined: 16 Mar 2012, 10:46pm

Re: Maps for Hebrides tour

Post by gloomyandy »

Oh and just a thought, but surprisingly I've often found that the maps that you get for free in TIC can be very useful. They often have places of interest, shops, cafes and other stuff marked that isn't on any road map. If you have a tablet/PC or whatever then you can easily purchase OS maps a relatively small "tile" at a time (which avoids having big chunks of sea!). I tend to purchase them for the islands I'm visiting and turn them into a pdf file that I store on my kindle (as I don't carry a tablet/PC). These are mainly used for planning where to visit next when stopped for the night or for lunch. The road atlas is fine for actual on the road navigation (I sometimes draw extra stuff on them if I'm going down a road that is not marked).
dbennett1882
Posts: 28
Joined: 30 Mar 2014, 12:38am

Re: Maps for Hebrides tour

Post by dbennett1882 »

gloomyandy wrote:Oh and just a thought, but surprisingly I've often found that the maps that you get for free in TIC can be very useful. They often have places of interest, shops, cafes and other stuff marked that isn't on any road map. If you have a tablet/PC or whatever then you can easily purchase OS maps a relatively small "tile" at a time (which avoids having big chunks of sea!). I tend to purchase them for the islands I'm visiting and turn them into a pdf file that I store on my kindle (as I don't carry a tablet/PC). These are mainly used for planning where to visit next when stopped for the night or for lunch. The road atlas is fine for actual on the road navigation (I sometimes draw extra stuff on them if I'm going down a road that is not marked).


thats great advice
thanks again
Dave
scelator703
Posts: 1
Joined: 16 Apr 2014, 10:03pm

Re: Maps for Hebrides tour

Post by scelator703 »

I think this is the one which we saw everyone using up there. We had a smaller scale one which had all of the important info on, but this one has all of the sights and what they were called. http://www.stanfords.co.uk/ProductDetai ... 1849073233
rualexander
Posts: 2639
Joined: 2 Jul 2007, 9:47pm
Contact:

Re: Maps for Hebrides tour

Post by rualexander »

The old Ordnance Survey Travelmaster series were good cycling maps, 1:250,000 scale topographic.
No longer available in paper form unless you can find them second hand, but available free to download the entire UK from Ordnance Survey here https://www.ordnancesurvey.co.uk/busine ... aster.html
You can then print your own sections as you need them, Toughprint waterproof paper is a good option for cycle touring.
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