Understanding Your Map

These are some basic features that most maps will include

Roads tend to be marked in different colours depending on the type of road depicted. Roads on a map range from thick blue lines, Showing motorways to dashed lines , indicating an unfenced minor road.

Footpaths are marked on Ordnance Survey maps in various colours. On a 1:25000 scale OS Explorer Map the public rights of way are marked in green and on a 1:50000 scale OS Land ranger Map they are marked in magenta. There are various types of public rights of way and public access, so please check the map key for full information. It is important to be aware that footpaths that are shown in black are not necessarily public rights of way.

Woods are shown in green with coniferous or non coniferous tree shape over the top

Buildings are marked by small black squares. However, some particular buildings have their own special symbols, such as churches and windmills. Any of these buildings can be useful landmarks, helping you to locate yourself on the map.

Rivers and Streams are shown as blue lines. The width of the line is representative of the watercourse width (if the width of the river is more than 8 metres it is shown as two blue lines with a light blue area between). Rivers and streams can be extremely useful in locating your position on a map 

Scale tells you how much the land has been scaled down to fit on the paper. If the scale of the map is 1:50000 then everything on the map will be 50000 times smaller than it is in reality.

Your Map will also contain other features and information that will be explained ,along with the features above, In the key of the map.

Setting the Map in relation to the Ground

Since the map is a plan representation to scale of the actual ground it should be possible to turn the map in such a way that with your own position as the central point all the features that you can see around you are in the correct relative positions. this is called setting or orienting the map and is one of the first and most important techniques of map reading.

Setting the map by reference to identifiable features on the ground. The feature, its position on the map, your position and your eye must all be in the same vertical plain.

The picture below shows how contour lines can be used to describe different landscapes. Even though all the lines look similar at first, they are describing very different landscape features