Have walked a substantial part of Watlington civil parish in two outings recently, upon resumption of my excursion through the Oxfordshire Chilterns checking the Public Rights of Way. The weather on both occasions has been magnificent and the areas have been a delight to walk and view.

I have had Harry Wood’s diary entry, “Using Rob Whitaker’s tool to map UK Public Rights of Way” at osm.org/user/Harry%20Wood/diary/45022 on my mind. It was interesting and thought-provoking to read. I believe Public Rights of Way are a fundamental fabric of our lives that helps make us who we are as a nation, historically. Harry writes, “But also it feels a bit like littering our data with 3rd party arbitrary reference codes. prow_ref values are certainly not verifiable on the ground!” There might be so many more elements uploaded to OSM thought to be “littering our data” before considering PRoW references, or tags, I feel. I should promote, rather, how this data might be used for everyone’s benefit. I agree the values are not verifiable on the ground, usually. There are examples in some of our civil parishes in South Oxfordshire, however, where it is the Chiltern Society, I believe, that has been responsible for adding its own references to trees, fence posts and suchlike. These are the codes it uses in its series of 32 Footpath Maps and which I add as tags in OSM to all the ways I walk. I have written in an earlier diary entry, “My ongoing relationship with OSM”, of how I have been able to download Oxfordshire County Council’s PRoW data, add elements to it and import it as a .kml file to Locus Map on my Android ‘phone, and use Vespucci, also, to have every piece of information to hand as I walk. I find this necessary because OSM offers no facility to use keys such as “prow_ref” or “ref:Chiltern_Society” instead of “Name”, or any app developer using OSM, so far as I know. How much easier it would be for every walker in our technological age were this possible. Additionally, my overlying Oxfordshire County Council data distinguishes between PRoWs and other footways that are present very much in OSM, giving a walker/rider confidence when in the countryside.

There is another aspect of walking PRoWs that fills my time, too: barriers. The Chiltern Society has done terrific work in my area of South Oxfordshire to replace stiles with kissing gates or gates, for which it should be commended. I walk as a helper with a visually-impaired group every fortnight. It has been so revealing on two counts: 1. it takes quite some time for each blind person to negotiate a stile and 2. most stiles do not have the facility to pass an assistance dog through, making it necessary to lift the dog, causing distress both to it and its owner. How much more enjoyable are the walks where they consist of gates and kissing gates, alone. My hope is that, by adding these barriers to OSM, it might be possible to compile a route and obtain a list of obstacles on it. That should make for a much more enjoyable walk, not only for the visually-impaired but others who might find stiles too much to negotiate, and give them the assuredness that none will be encountered. I wonder if an OSM contributor might create a simple method of carrying out such an exercise in one of its editors such as JOSM, say? Alternatively, I am reminded, suddenly, of my topic in Talk-GB last year here, https://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/talk-gb/2017-October/020702.html, where I received extremely helpful replies from Roland. https://overpass-turbo.eu/s/sh7 identifies all PRoWs in Checkendon civil parish, if within the map area, having stiles. Removing line 3, “way(bn)[prow_ref];” in Overpass Turbo and rerunning the query displays the stiles themselves. How all of this might be made available to the wider public, I am not sure!