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| Ellie and Dave Brewer - the Hertfordshire Walker team |
We have been sharing our walks online for more than 25 years. They have always been free of charge and always will be.
We have no connection with a company that created a paid-for subscription walking app in April 2022 and charges to access walks.
Our aim is to share our love of walking in the Hertfordshire countryside with like-minded people who also enjoy getting out and about.
Dave built the site and plots and maps all the walks, takes the photos, writes the directions, and manages the website. Ellie is the map reader and navigator and is also in charge of quality control having the final decision regarding which walks are published on the site.
Dave has worked as a journalist and editor in print, broadcast and online journalism. He was a political correspondent at the BBC, the managing editor of BBC News Online, the managing editor at CNN.com Europe, Middle East, and Africa, and the launch consultant for Al Jazeera English.
Apart from updating Hertfordshire Walker he is also the founder and editor of Media Helping Media which provides free journalism training resources for journalists living in countries where the media is still developing.
Ellie has worked in the insurance industry and in human resources for a charity helping people with learning disabilities. She is a big Zumba and yoga fan.
The first few walks in the collection are about three to four miles long and fairly easy. Most of the earlier walks are around Brookmans Park; this is because we first started publishing walks near our home on a village website we ran. When we had walked most of the local paths we created this site, Hertfordshire Walker, and expanded our range to cover the whole county.
We have walked every inch of every walk on our site, sometimes several times. We would never publish a walk unless we had throughly tested it. However, we haven't yet visited all of the 220+ pubs that our routes pass. We have a page listing all the pubs on our walks in case you want to check them out.
During the Covid lockdown we walked more locally again. Many of the earlier walks feature our local pub, The Woodman at Wildhill. We have created 10 circular walks for The Woodman that all start and finish in the pub's car park.
You will notice that many of our walks have the word 'loop' in the title. That means they have the same start and finish points. We also have a collection of linear walks where the distance between the start and finish points can be covered by public transport.
Along the way you might encounter step stiles, gates, muddy paths, small hills, overgrown paths, and footbridges. Our walks follow public rights of way, and include footpaths, bridleways, byways.
You can select a walk by choosing the distance and total elevation you can manage.
Boots and wet weather gear, a bottle of water, a snack, and the correct map for the area are recommended. As is a stick if you are walking during the spring and summer when nettles and thistles might encroach on the paths. We also carry antihistamine cream in case we get stung by nettles or insects, and secateurs for cutting back brambles. We have a page containing walking tips for those following our routes.
If you enjoy our walks please let us know by either leaving a comment at the foot of the walk or joining our members-only Hertfordshire Walker Facebook group. We love it when walkers add their feedback and share tips and suggestions for the benefit of other walkers. We read every comment.
We don't run adverts on Hertfordshire Walker, preferring to donate the space to support The Trussell Trust which supports "a nationwide network of food banks" in order to "provide emergency food and support to people locked in poverty" while also campaigning to "end the need for food banks in the UK".
As far as the costs for running Hertfordshire Walker are concerned, we are happy to cover them from our own pockets. Hertfordshire Walker is a hobby shared with like-minded fellow walkers, not a business.
We are grateful to Zsolt Ero from MapHub for allowing us to use their amazing mapping tools to create all the walking maps and GPX files on the site.
Hertfordshire Walker is on Mastodon.