At The Ireland Walking Guide, we believe that all recreational walkers should possess the level of knowledge and skills required for the type of walking they do. If you only expect to walk waymarked trails in lowland parks and woodland, you can get away with having no special knowledge or skills at all. If you are a non-leading member of a hillwalking club or an informal group who regularly meets up on the hills, you are expected to at least know how to dress and pack for a full day off the beaten track, although a basic understanding of navigation is encouraged, even if it is only using a GPS device or smartphone app. If you are a solo hillwalker, a walk leader on the hills and mountains, or are just taking your hillwalking a bit more seriously, you need to go the whole hog. This means learning how to plan walks and navigate along your chosen route confidently and competently using only a hardcopy map and traditional compass.
This section of the website aims to help recreational walkers acquire the knowledge and skills they need for walking in the great outdoors. While the information and guidance we provide in this section is useful for all walkers, much of it is aimed specifically at hillwalkers.
All hillwalkers should skill up for the hills
We won't sugar-coat it. With the introduction of social media, spoon-feed websites and mapping apps in recent years, the number of people hillwalking in Ireland has increased like never before. A large proportion of the Irish hillwalking community are now relying on GPS and phone apps to navigate. Many don't even carry hardcopy maps in their backpacks. The uncoordinated, but collective, efforts of online platforms, is to make hillwalking easier by removing the need for knowledge and skills at a personal level. As a result of this, the collective attitude among hillwalkers has become "why should I learn to navigate when I can simply follow someone else's GPX route on my phone?" That attitude is all well and good until your phone falls in a stream or smashes against a rock. From this situation, without real knowledge and skills to get you back to the car, comes the embarrassment of having to call Mountain Rescue. Some hillwalkers have even become so resistant to the idea of bringing a hardcopy map and compass on to the hills that they will carry multiple phones and power packs.
By encouraging the Irish hillwalking community to skill up, we aim to nudge hillwalkers back on track to becoming confident and competent navigators who do not rely on GPS and apps. To get everyone back into the habit of planning walks themselves "the old-fashioned way" by spreading a paper map out on the dining table. To learn (or re-learn) how to navigate on the hills using that same paper map, partnered with a traditional magnetic compass. To escape from those screens we have all become so addicted to. And to save everyone some money by making all those inward-facing online subscription platforms completely redundant. Step 1 is to attend that skills course or buy (and read) that navigation book. The next step, is to maintain your skills by using them every time you go out on the hills.
This section of the website aims to help recreational walkers acquire the knowledge and skills they need for walking in the great outdoors. While the information and guidance we provide in this section is useful for all walkers, much of it is aimed specifically at hillwalkers.
All hillwalkers should skill up for the hills
We won't sugar-coat it. With the introduction of social media, spoon-feed websites and mapping apps in recent years, the number of people hillwalking in Ireland has increased like never before. A large proportion of the Irish hillwalking community are now relying on GPS and phone apps to navigate. Many don't even carry hardcopy maps in their backpacks. The uncoordinated, but collective, efforts of online platforms, is to make hillwalking easier by removing the need for knowledge and skills at a personal level. As a result of this, the collective attitude among hillwalkers has become "why should I learn to navigate when I can simply follow someone else's GPX route on my phone?" That attitude is all well and good until your phone falls in a stream or smashes against a rock. From this situation, without real knowledge and skills to get you back to the car, comes the embarrassment of having to call Mountain Rescue. Some hillwalkers have even become so resistant to the idea of bringing a hardcopy map and compass on to the hills that they will carry multiple phones and power packs.
By encouraging the Irish hillwalking community to skill up, we aim to nudge hillwalkers back on track to becoming confident and competent navigators who do not rely on GPS and apps. To get everyone back into the habit of planning walks themselves "the old-fashioned way" by spreading a paper map out on the dining table. To learn (or re-learn) how to navigate on the hills using that same paper map, partnered with a traditional magnetic compass. To escape from those screens we have all become so addicted to. And to save everyone some money by making all those inward-facing online subscription platforms completely redundant. Step 1 is to attend that skills course or buy (and read) that navigation book. The next step, is to maintain your skills by using them every time you go out on the hills.
