UKC

Hi All. I'm preparing a talk on contour line interpretation for my local walking group. It will be more fun that it sounds...I promise! In short I'm hoping to go further than the walking instruction books that tell you to look at contours and if you think hard enough a 3D hill will pop into your head. I will be creating all sorts of 3D images and animations to demonstrate in depth how contours work, and how walkers can get their heads around them in areas of difficult terrain.

And here's where I need your help: I'm looking for some locations for places with 'easy' contours. By that I mean landscapes which are smooth and shapely, gently undulating, and whose ground surface is not too bumpy. These would be ideal places to show a beginner a map and help them relate the map to the landscape.

Here's an example to show you what I mean. I can't attach an image to this forum, but here's a link to an OS 1:25k map of Fionn Bheinn up in Scotland : http://binged.it/1WOcGG0

Note the lovely smooth slopes to the west and south - nice and easy contours for a beginner to grasp, nice and event slopes, and easy to fit to a mental model of what it should like. Then look at the coire to the north east: much more bumpy uneven terrain, contours much harder to make sense of. This is good for my purposes as it shows contrast. Not that we have to look hard in Scotland for complex terrain!

And then finally look at the peat bog to the east of Meall a' Chaorainn where the contours are sparse but wiggle all over the place. This is a classic signature of gently sloping but uneven terrain.

As you can see, I want to really help my audience to extract as much information as possible from contours. I'm looking for 'easy' sites in the first instance, so if you can suggest an locations (Scotland or UK) where the contours are easy to grasp...the kind of place you might take a beginner to teach them about contours....then please share them.

I have lots of other ideas too and will post more if there's an appetite here for this kind of thing. I'm particularly interested in the accuracy of contour lines, and how different maps (eg OS vs Harvey) can portray the same area very differently. Especially if you're doing a mountain leader course and the assessor asks you to "take me to this ring contour....or this wiggle in the contour line". Sometimes people read too much into the contours: there are limits to accuracy, and I'm keen to explore these empirically. I hope this thread makes sense, apologies for wandering. And if anyone knows how to stick an image in a post I'd love to hear! Thanks

In reply to jt256:

The link didn't work for me.

But not being funny, if you can run a presentation on 'contours' why can't you simply look at a map yourself and use your own experience to do this? Somewhere closer to where the group is based. (Unless you are living in Holland that is!)

I'd have thought most competent map readers could find suitable examples near where you live?

D

In reply to Dave Perry:

Exactly, give relevant examples. If you live in lancs, pendle. N York's roseberry. Even if It's a sloping village green or the matterhorn, visualisation will be a million times easier.Also try to be more concise in your explanation that your post here(no offence).

In reply to jt256:

I have had nav training in the Cairngorms and in Snowdonia. The one in Snowdonia was a lot easier - as the terrain was very smooth. But I learned a lot more in the Cairngorms even though it was a lot harder.

I do also remember reading in one of the mountaincraft books that Torridonian sandstone mountains can be tricky - as on most other mountain areas you’d be right in thinking you could march down a 30 degree slope, but in Torridon that slope might be a series of totally vertical steps with horizontal ledges. But with a reccy, you can eliminate this as an issue.

Hope something in there helps

In reply to jt256:

It's not just about the contours

In reply to jt256:

Do you really want gentle undulating contours to get across the points you seem to want to make? A good tip for making this stand out from the page for the first time for someone is to show them the mapping of a sharper cleft/gorge with a water course running down its middle that heads to a pool/lake.

The first time someone tries to get their head round this they can often see that closer contours mean a steeper slope but are often blocked by not knowing which way those slopes go as it is a bit of mental juggling to look at marked contours or spot heights. A water feature makes this intuitive.

In reply to jt256:
Lincolnshire?

In reply to jt256:

Western Linconshire is an ideal location. Scarpment on Western side where it drops towards the trent(?) valley and incredibly shallow fall off towards the NE sea. I think !

Your club will love a mountaineering trip to Linconshire.