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 Cald
