How to get there,
and Settings for
SatNav and Driving information
Having found a walk you would like to go on, either in the Forthcoming Walks page of this website, or in the programme which we send out to our members every few months, you will need to know how to get to the meeting point. We usually set off from there, but sometimes we use another form of transport, such as a bus, to get to the actual start of the walk.
As well as naming the meeting point, such as "Newton Abbot Railway Station" we will also give a Grid Reference (SX 867 712 for the station) and usually a SatNav setting (TQ12 2JE if you've a train to catch).
The Grid Reference should take you to within two or three hundred feet of the meeting point, but SatNav may only be the location of the nearest postcode. In country areas, this could be a home or business half a mile or more away from where you need to be. One extreme case of this is Venford Reservoir on Dartmoor, where the nearest postcode is ¾ mile away as the crow flies, but almost 7 miles by road! Where this happens, we may show "Postcode too far away" instead of a SatNav setting.
You can use the Map or Satellite buttons in each walk description on the Forthcoming Walks page, to give you either a map or an aerial view of the area, with the meeting point shown by a coloured marker. If the place the SatNav postcode will take you to is going to be some way away from the meeting point, you can have the marker for the meeting point shown yellow instead of red, with a further blue marker showing where the SatNav postcode will take you. Use the following buttons to choose which markers are displayed.
Some SatNavs, and many route-finding applications on smartphones or tablets, can take Latitude and Longitude instead of a postcode. Each value has several figures, and the pair are not as easy to keep in mind as a postcode (50.5300, -3.5997 for Newton Abbot station), but they do completely overcome the problem of the meeting point being some way away from the nearest home or business. Use the following buttons to choose how the SatNav entry is shown in the table.
For most of our Forthcoming Walks (but not for Archive Walks), we offer Driving time and distance, starting from your choice of the six possible places shown below, one of which will be reasonably near to over three quarters of our members. Use the following buttons to choose your preferred town.
Any options which you choose from those listed above will be stored by your browser (such as Chrome, Edge, Firefox or Safari), for use with the Forthcoming Walks and Past Walks Archive pages of this website. For the technically minded, the method used to preserve these settings is HTML Local Storage, which does not involve any use of cookies, and we have no means of knowing which choices you have made.
If you have more than one device, for example a computer and a smartphone, you will need to make your choices on each device, but they don't need to be the same on each device.
If you use the Safari browser, which will almost certainly be the case if you have a device made by Apple, such as an iPad or an iPhone, and your browser is set for Private Browsing (which is shown by the address bar at the top of any web page having a dark background), then your device will be unable to store your choices. If you don't want to re-enter them each time you use our website, then you will need to abandon Private Browsing. An Internet search along the lines of 'safari stop private browsing' should show you how to do this.