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When I decided to spend a whole year exploring the map that covers the area around my house, just outside London, I hoped it would help me to slow down, pay attention, discover new places and learn more about nature. Each week I explored a single 1km grid square, picked at random. The project helped me to build a routine of exercise, fresh air and mental headspace. It was an opportunity to step away from emails and beeping notifications for a few hours each week. As such, I wanted as little to do with my phone’s tempting distractions as possible.
But, if used with purpose and self-control, my phone was also a very useful tool in helping me get the most out of my explorations, filling in knowledge gaps and reminding me that staying permanently curious was central to the entire endeavour. Here are some of the apps I found most useful:
• Weather My policy for heading out each week to explore a grid square was to do so come rain or shine. If you only go out during fine weather, you’re in for a long winter indoors. Besides, once I was committed and outside, I often enjoyed my rainy hikes through deserted woodland. There are many weather apps and forecasts available but the one I found specifically useful on this project was HyperLocal. Its radar map gives you a very short-term forecast for your location, helping you decide whether a rain shower is going to pass quickly or is settling in for the day. I used it often to choose whether to shelter under a tree, linger in a café or just to suck it up and accept that I was going to get soggy.
Hyperlocal Weather; free
• Nature Although I studied science for A-level and have a degree in Zoology, I was astonished how little I knew about the everyday nature I found on my map. I became aware of so many plants that I had never even noticed before. The Seek app became my trusty professor, every week. Point your phone at a plant (or insect and animal if you’re fast enough) and Seek tells you its name. Learn the name of something and you soon see it everywhere and begin to care for it more. My very favourite app on this project.
Seek; free.
• Birds I like hearing birdsong when I’m outdoors. We all do. But my knowledge was woefully limited to the owl, seagull and cuckoo level. Merlin listens to birdsong and tells you, in real time, what you are listening to. Realising that your patch of woodland is full of chiffchaffs and wrens adds a richer level of joy to your springtime walks. I learned so much from this app, although I still find it frustratingly difficult to identify birds without it.
Merlin; free.
• Fungi The autumnal months of my exploration were filled with me wishing that I could feast on all the delicious-looking mushrooms that appeared across my map. Wisely, I resisted the temptation, as gathering mushrooms without proper knowledge is a risky business (they say that all mushrooms are edible, but many of them only once). While the Shroomify app did not make me confident enough to eat any mushrooms, I enjoyed using it to help me name and identify the weird and wonderful specimens I found on my outings.
Shroomify; free.
• Suncalc As my fondness for combining adventure and photography grew, I often found myself planning to take photographs around the hour of sunset. SunCalc is a simple app that helps you work out where the sun will rise or set, and therefore to position yourself perfectly for that winning snap (or sundown beer, perhaps.) Its partner app, MoonCalc, was helpful to me during the year I spent taking a walk each full moon, enabling me to predict where and when the moon would rise.
Suncalc (Android); (Apple version); Free.
Mooncalc (Android only); Free.
• Stars One of the best ways to remind yourself of how much we take where we live for granted is to experience it in a different way — after dark. Walking lanes by night brings your senses of smell and hearing to the fore. One of the most enjoyable parts of exploring at night is the opportunity to marvel at the stars overhead. Star Walk tells you the names of the stars you are looking at, and gives handy information too, as well as details about any satellites drifting across the night sky.
Starwalk; Free
• Ships and planes Is it a bird? (Ask Merlin.) Is it a plane? Ask FlightRadar, a nifty app that tells you what flight is passing overhead. One of the reasons I began exploring my local map was to try to look differently at travel and adventure and stop using aeroplanes. My worries at the start of the year that I would miss it terribly proved unfounded, but it was still fun to ponder about who was flying where while I explored my own backyard. A similar app for shipping, Ship Finder, is interesting if you are by the coast, helping you separate dirty British coasters from stately Spanish galleons.
Flightradar24; free.
Shipfinder; free
• Kids Exploring your local neighbourhood one grid square at a time is a perfect project for the whole family to do together. But if you meet resistance from young ones about such a wholesome activity being “boring”, Geocaching is a great way to incorporate both screen time and outdoor time. Consider it a worldwide treasure hunt, with small boxes containing a notebook to sign and trinkets to swap, concealed in an extraordinary number of places around the globe. There are probably several close to where you live, and the geocaching app is your key to finding where they are. You can even find a geocach at the South Pole.
Geocaching; free
‘Local’ by Alastair Humphreys is published by Eye Books
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