Why does WalkOurWorld think I am in the United States of America when I am really in the United Kingdom (or some other country)?

WalkOurWorld and other sites hosted by OurWorld Internet Services decode incoming requests. The server tries to work out from the Internet Protocol (IP) numbers in your request which country the request is coming from, using freely available lists which map groups of IP numbers to countries.

Some Internet Service Providers (AOL for example) assign numbers to their customers' internet connections which are drawn from a block that the freely available list says is allocated to the United States.

We will make efforts to try to amend the list we use so that anomalies like this do not happen, but this requires cooperation with our development staff on the part of ISPs like AOL.

In the meantime, if your country is mis-recognised, use the country drop-down option list at the top left of the page to select your correct country. Then, when the page has reloaded, click the "Save" checkbox at the top left. The page will again reload, with the checkbox now labelled "Clear", and a 'cookie' set in your machine which tells our server to load the page with your country and language preferences (read from the cookie), rather than those which it would guess from the IP numbers if there was no cookie set.

We know about the AOL anomaly, which applies to users in many countries, but if you experience this problem with another Internet Service Provider we would much like to know about it. You can contact the WebMaster by clicking on the link at the foot of the page.

Why does WalkOurWorld use old maps?

Philosophically, we believe that data collected and already paid for out of taxpayers money should be made available to those taxpayers for free, or at least at no more than the cost of storing and distributing it. In the case of data held on internet connected servers, for a large organisation this cost would be negligible.

That policy is now adopted in some countries, for example Canada.

The United Kingdom authorities take a different view, and oblige the Ordnance Survey to charge expensive licenses for use of mapped data, which UK citizens have already paid for once through their taxes.

Because of this we use out-of-copyright maps. In the case of Ordnance Survey maps, this means maps which were published at least 50 years ago.

Fortunately mountains and open spaces, where the best walks tend to be, don't move much, so good old maps, like the 1940 War Series, are fine for our purpose.

Mostly we try to source old maps through Ebay, but we are also very grateful to people like Mike Calder for making available to us scans of sheets we have not been able to acquire yet for use on the site. Please visit Mike Calder's website with England & Wales OS Quarter inch Atlas. As well as the maps, he has some excellent photographs online.