Having crossed the path of the guided busway on foot on Sunday, I realised that the cycle path alongside it (which doubles up as an access road for the guideway itself) seemed to be complete but was not on the map. So armed with strong lights, GPS and accompanied by a couple of friends we decided to start at the point where it joins Milton Road and head north-west and just see what we found.

Essentially there is now a path of compacted gravel which goes at least as far as Swavesey (where we turned round), which changes from side to side a few times. However in places it is rather rough for a road bike to go along, so there were a number of places (particularly at junctions) where we had to get off and go onto the path of the main guideway. There were also a not inconsiderable number of objects placed in the way, including heavy machinery. I have been told that the cycle path is due to be tarmacked, but I don't know whether this is along the whole length or just some of it. In short, although there are signs indicating that it is a cycle path it doesn't seem to be completely finished yet, although there were no signs indicating that the public shouldn't go along it. In fact we met a handful of security guards near some of the machinery, and none of them was in the least bit concerned by our presence.

At Swavesey there was a nice sign indicating that it was 11 miles to Cambridge and 3 miles to St. Ives, that it was part of NCN route 51 and that it was accessible for pedestrians, cyclists and horse riders. Seeing this sign made me very pleased, but it would have been nice to see similar signs confirming the route at the junctions in Longstanton, Oakington and Histon. Maybe they'll appear in due course. I've left the ncn_ref=51 off the sections nearer to Cambridge due to this uncertainty.

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Finally got round to surveying Sutton, Cambridgeshire this afternoon. It's a surprisingly large village, but I managed to get it done before the light faded. I attracted the interest of some teenagers, who finally asked me what I was doing when I was cycling around a football pitch. So I explained to them, and showed them my GPS with the trace of the village and my notebook with the sketches and street names. I have to say the look on their faces suggested they thought I was some sort of weirdo.
I started to look around the industrial site to the North of the roundabout off the A142, and almost immediately a security guard stopped me and informed me it was private land (there was no sign saying as much). However I did get to go up to the entrance to the power station, which was a bit of a surprise - no indication of what method of producing power it used, although a gentle plume of smoke/steam suggested combustion of some sort.

All in all a very pleasant afternoon's cycle mapping as it was partly sunny and not particularly cold. However my original intention to do Mepal as well didn't happen as I ran out of time.

Spent a bit of time tidying up what little mapping has been done so in Yeovil, Somerset (England) using NPE maps and local knowledge. Things including adding roundabouts, adding a number of one-way tags on dual-carriageways, correcting the direction of one-ways, addition of a few roads that are on NPE, correcting a few name errors where roads appear to have been (incorrectly) merged. To be honest though, this town of 35,000 is in desperate need of a mapping party! So much has changed since the NPE maps were produced that much of the layout is completely unrecognisable these days, and my tidy-ups were necessarily somewhat limited. Even getting accurate traces of the main features in the town centre would be a very useful improvement, let alone doing the residential roads in the suburbs.

Took the train from Waterbeach station to Ely today, then walked the 12 miles back along the west side of the Ouse/Cam that was previously largely un-mapped. A very chilly, misty morning but it was windless and not raining, so actually a very pleasant walk. There was a short section that I did last weekend, so I by-passed this via a byway/bridle way running south from Little Thetford, which is also now on the map. I had to make quite a number of adjustments to the alignment of the river Cam, which I think was traced from satellite and originally crossed the path that I was following. It now actually runs between the two embankments for the whole route! There is a single footpath south of Little Thetford which I put in a stub for, don't know where it goes but it heads towards Stretham - this will need mapping at some stage. Most of it is also tagged embankment=yes, although there's a short section which doesn't follow the embankment and actually goes between a couple of lakes and the river. Will need a return trip to map these lakes plus the adjacent embankment. Also a section of embankment just east of Waterbeach station needs adding.

Finally got some accurate traces of Bradford Abbas, and now believe the village itself to be complete. Also added the remaining parts of The Cobb, Lyme Regis.

Just added a number of footpaths that I had the pleasure to walk over the weekend in the Wye Valley area between Tintern and Chepstow. There's a reasonable amount of mapping data in this area already, but a lot of it seems to be from the NPE maps and either out of date or inaccurate. For example the boundaries of wooded areas don't match with what we found on the ground in all places. There's a lot more mapping that can be done in this area, including more paths, accurate outlines of woodland, disused railways, quarries and so forth. It's a beautiful area for walking in and quite easy to get lost in the woodlands - especially where there is a high density of paths going in different directions. Definitely warrants a return journey.

I took part in the annual Duo Normand cycle race on 24th September in Marigny, Normandy. Turns out most of the route wasn't on the map.....so I took my GPS with me and it's now added (although still awaiting rendering as I write this). Actually the GPS was my only means of knowing the altitude and hence gauging how far up each of the hills I was, so it was a useful piece of equipment during the race as well. I've also added a route relation to mark the course.

And yes, a finer examination of the GPS trace would reveal that I didn't do it in a particularly fast time!

Went out for a lovely evening cycle ride to do some mapping, and managed to complete Wentworth, Coveney, Wardy Hill and Witcham, as well as finishing off Haddenham which I started a couple of weeks ago. Unfortunately I had a couple of problems - firstly, as I finished Haddenham I checked that the GPS was still running and it wasn't - leaving me with an unknown amount of data to repeat on a future occasion (it was beginning to get dark by this time). When I got home it seemed worse than this, as I couldn't initially find the tracks at all. however further investigation revealed that the clock had somehow got reset, and it had indeed saved the tracks but as the name starts off with the date, it was completely wrong. I uploaded the main track to discover that I had lost only four residential roads as well as the circumnavigation of Haddenham recreation ground - not too much, but annoying as it will require a return trip to complete it. I had made a note of all the names, so I've added them to the map as best I can from memory with a note that they need resurveying. Fortunately

I've just added a whole load more lakes in southern Peru from the aerial photography. The more I search, the more lakes I find.....I've gradually been working north, but I reached a point where my wrist was aching so much from repeated mouse clicks that I had to stop. There are many hours more work to be done here, even to reach the same latitude as Lima. It's a fascinating landscape and occasionally I come across a settlement, but usually I have no clue what it's called so it becomes an anonymous town, for the time being.

My plans to go out mapping during the lovely summer weather keep getting messed up by the fact that the weather isn't lovely. I had big plans to go out and do a lot more of Soham by bike yesterday, but as it was raining we decided just to go out for a walk instead. Of course I took the GPS, but somehow the 'pause' button got pressed while it was in my pocket so I now have 3 traces, only one of which is really useful. I've added the data to the map, but it looks a bit odd to be honest - footpaths and a stream that start and stop in the middle of nowhere, tiny sections of road that aren't connected to anything. Maybe that will give me the incentive to go back sooner rather than later to finish the job - the roads will be easy to finish on 2 wheels at least.

I've noticed this week that changes don't seem to be appearing in the osmarender layer. Looking at the server status pages it looks like there is a large backlog (30,000 requests). There are also some changes I made a few weeks ago which still aren't rendered at all at lower resolutions. Is it the case that we have reached the point where there are simply more people editing openstreetmap.org, but without a corresponding increase in the number of people willing to render tiles? If so, what can be done about it? Do we just need more people to volunteer their CPU time to keep up?

I noticed that Deelkar expressed some concerns about osmarender a few weeks ago, especially concerning the hardware requirements for rendering the more complicated tiles - these can take up to 12GB of RAM to render, which is more than most people have available. It seems that the osmarender infrastructure is creaking at the seams, I'm not one of the developers but wonder what (if anything) I can do to help. I find osmarender really useful as a preliminary check of my edits, it usually flags up a few issues that require tweaking before Mapnik renders those changes on a Wednesday.

I've spent a bit of time adding most of the lakes and a few rivers of Southern Peru to the map, mainly in the Arequipa district, tracing them from the Yahoo imagery. This area had pretty much no mapping at all until a few weeks ago (with the exception of Lake Titicaca), so it seemed appropriate to add a number of the basic geographical features. I've also added a few of the major volcanic peaks, but these don't seem to show up on the map. Hopefully this should provide a basic geographical framework for further mapping - the imagery isn't high enough resolution to be able to make out all the roads clearly (at least not the unpaved ones, i.e. the majority), but the mountains are pretty spectacular and valleys easy to follow.

A thought occurred to me - some of these places are very remote, and probably have never been accurately mapped. The advent of satellite imagery makes this possible for the first time.

Spent this afternoon with Jon Schneider and another friend mapping part of Soham. Fairly successful exceot that our local host and tea provider decided not to be at home and we couldn't connect to his wireless access point from outside his house to enter the data. That and the two-way radios we were using didn't really have enough range to be useful while on foot. Three people, 3 laptops with 3 operating systems, 3 mobile phones and what seemed like a vast array of technology that should enable connectivity so we felt somewhat inadequate!

There's still a lot of Soham to do, it would have been better to cycle it rather than walk it. Will have to make a return visit or two, then on to the villages of Haddenham, Aldreth, Wilburton and Stretham which also need a fair bit of work.

OK I think I can declare Cottenham essentially finished, covering all roads and footpaths in the village. Of course the minute I post this I will discover a whole raft of points of interest that should be on the map.

OK spent an hour and a half cycling the last remaining bits of Cottenham this afternoon, mainly Smithy Fen. As far as I know that's all of the roads on the map now (once it updates). I also added 6 post boxes, one telephone, the fire station, the pharmacy, one shop, the war memorial, the fuel station and the recreation grounds with their various sections. I also covered a bit of Rampton, including the moat around Giant's Hill. I tagged it as waterway=moat, which isn't a standard tag but a proposed feature, and therefore presumably won't show on the standard renderers. I added a point in the centre historical=archaeological_site, name=Giant's Hill so at least that will appear.

What are still missing from Cottenham are the various footpaths and bridleways surrounding the village, and Cottenham Lode, which I think probably counts as waterway=stream even though it's clearly manmade - I guess the original course was similar but probably changed from year to year, and the banks were built to prevent flooding and enable agriculture on the surrounding land. That's a job for next weekend.

Just added some more roads in Cottenham, Cambridgeshire which were missing, including Brenda Gautrey Way, Sovereign Way, Paxton Close, Leopold Walk, Coolidge Gardens, Margett Street, Corbet Street, Telegraph Street, New Road and Millfield.