Waymarks are reassurance, not navigation

A waymark disc is a lovely thing. It confirms you are on the right line, often exactly at the moment doubt creeps in. But it is not a navigation system on its own. Discs go missing, fade, get swallowed by hawthorn, or appear only at junctions and then vanish for a kilometre of open moorland. Fingerposts lean, arrows get twisted, and stiles sometimes carry two discs pointing in different directions because two paths cross there.

The map is what tells you where the path runs when nothing is painted on a post. It also tells you what lies either side of you: the wall you can follow if the trod fades, the stream that means you have drifted too far east, the forestry edge that marks the end of the open ground. Treat the two together and you will rarely be lost for long.

Know what the discs are actually telling you

In England and Wales, the colour of a waymark tells you what you are legally allowed to do, which is also a strong clue about the surface underfoot.

• Yellow means public footpath: on foot only, and often the narrowest, muddiest, least obvious line on the ground.
• Blue means bridleway: walkers, cyclists and horse riders, usually wider and with better-drained surfaces and gentler gradients.
• Red means byway open to all traffic, so expect ruts and vehicles.
• Purple means restricted byway: walkers, horses, cyclists and non-mechanically propelled vehicles.
• National Trails use an acorn symbol, and long-distance routes sometimes have their own badge.

Look at the shape of the arrow as well as the colour. An arrow on a disc at a gate often points along the line of travel, not perpendicular to the gate. If a disc is screwed to a post facing sideways, walk a few metres and look again, because the path may leave at an angle you cannot see from where you are standing.

Read the land from the contour lines

Contours are the most useful lines on the map and the ones new walkers skip. On a 1:25,000 map they are drawn every 5 metres of height; on a 1:50,000 map, every 10 metres. Tightly packed lines mean steep ground. Widely spaced lines mean gentle ground. Every fifth line is usually thicker and numbered, so you can find your height by counting down or up from a labelled one.

Three shapes are worth memorising. A V-shaped contour points uphill, so the land inside the V is a valley or a re-entrant. A contour that bulges outward in a rounded U is a spur, and a path along a spur usually stays high. A closed ring, small and tight, is a summit or a knoll; a closed ring with hachures inside is a crag or a depression. If your path is supposed to run level across a hillside, check that it sits between two contours that stay roughly parallel. If the map shows it climbing 40 metres over a short distance, you should feel that climb underfoot, and if you do not, you have taken the wrong fork.

The symbols that decide your day

Rights of way are drawn as coloured dashes on the 1:25,000 series: green dashes for footpaths, longer green dashes for bridleways, green crosses for byways. Solid black lines are walls, fences and hedges. A line with small cross ticks is a wall; a plain line with dots is a fence.

Watch for the small symbols that change everything in practice: gates, stiles, footbridges, fords, marsh and rough pasture, and the green shading that marks access land. A footbridge symbol means the stream is crossable; a ford symbol means it may not be. A line of dashes crossing a shaded marsh is a path that may be knee-deep in winter. Checking these before you set off saves a lot of standing about in the rain.

When the path splits or fades away

Stop early, while you still know exactly where you are. Set the map by aligning it with the ground using obvious features, or with your compass if there are none. Then fold it so the relevant section fits your map case and keep your thumb on your current position as you move.

Two simple techniques cover most situations. Pacing: count double paces and learn your own figure, typically around 65 to 70 double paces per 100 metres on level ground. Timing: allow roughly 4 kilometres per hour, plus about a minute for every 10 metres of ascent, so a 6 kilometre walk with 300 metres of climbing takes about an hour and a half of moving time.

• Handrails are features you can follow to a definite point: a wall, a stream, a ridgeline, a forest edge. Even if the trod vanishes, the wall will take you to the gate.
• Catching features are backstops beyond your target, such as a road, a river or a plantation boundary. They tell you that you have gone too far.
• Aiming off means deliberately heading to one side of your target so that when you meet the handrail you know which way to turn.

Small habits that keep you on track

Mark your position on the map every ten minutes or so, not every hour. Turn round regularly and look at the view behind you, because the return leg will look nothing like the outward one. Note the grid reference of your start point before you leave the car, and check the map margin for the magnetic variation figure and the year it applies to; in Britain the difference between grid north and magnetic north is currently small enough to ignore for most lowland walking, but the margin is the authority, not memory.

Carry a compass even when the forecast is glorious, keep the map dry, and shorten your ambitions rather than your attention when the cloud comes down. The paths that catch people out are rarely the dramatic ones. They are the faint green dashes in the corner of a field, half a kilometre from the last waymark, where two likely-looking gaps in the hedge both seem to lead somewhere. Read the map before you get there and the choice becomes obvious.