🥾 Walk 300 - Lee's Map-Reading Walk at Cookham

We're always looking for new walk leaders, as are most other walking groups, and quite often we have members who would like to lead a walk but doubt their own navigational skills. Lee, from the Berkshire Walkers 20s & 30s, led a special map-reading walk for his group and ours on the last Saturday in September.

Starting from outside Cookham railway station, we were instructed to count our paces while walking between two fixed points to help us with estimating short distances. Arriving at a nearby playing field, Lee gave some instruction on understanding various map symbols and on working out bearings and distances to points on the map.

As the walk progressed, Lee would nominate someone from the group to lead a small section of the walk before stopping and explaining some new features of map-reading. Then it would be someone else's turn to navigate the next section. Even though I'm an experienced walk leader, I still felt a slight pang of nerves when Lee pointed at me and said 'You lead the next section.'.

The beautiful blue sky gradually clouded over and a fine drizzle began around lunchtime, so we stopped off to eat our packed lunches in the woods. The drizzle stopped as we continued the walk, arriving at Cookham Rise, where we made a welcome stop at the Jolly Farmer for a drink. We sat outside and were joined by the pub cat, who chose to lie down on Lee's overturned rucksack!

The last part of our walk took in Winter Hill and its golf course. En route, Lee was getting us to spot visible landmarks and locate them on the map, and also got us to estimate the gradient of the path through the golf course. By the time we'd got back to the railway station, most of us had led part of the walk. See our route on Google Maps. Thanks Lee, for an enjoyable and educational walk.

📸 Back to Volume 21

Return to volume index