Cygnor Sir Ynys Môn (Isle of Anglesey County Council) had a series of ageing, circular, coastal, bi-lingual walking maps available as PDFs on their Visit Anglesey website which were in dire need of refreshing, improving and expanding, and in late-2024 they invited us to undertake a project to overhaul them and develop the series.

 

Their ten existing routes needed physically surveying and checking, the mapping and instruction sheets required re-designing from scratch, and two new, shorter urban routes were to be devised for the towns of Beaumaris and Holyhead.  Additionally, new information about local history and wildlife, refreshment opportunities and public transport options on or near all 12 routes also needed researching, meaning that before any field-work could commence, a large amount of desk-based preparation had to be done.

 

In December 2024 FourPoint Mapping walked all 12 walks, making notes, taking photographs, categorising them in terms of difficulty, and creating GPX trails as we went.  Once all the data had been captured, back in the office a system of adaptable cartographic and graphic stylings were devised to work across the series. The maps and information sheets needed to be consistent in appearance: the lengths of walks varied from 3km to 20km, and scales for the 12 individual A4 maps would range from 1:2,900 to 1:22,500, some very rural, some entirely urban, with some in landscape and some in portrait format. Each route also had an elevation profile created for it indicating the gradients and distances to be expected, and also a locator graphic putting the walk in context with the Anglesey coast.

 

We then set about creating an A4 ‘template’ for one of the routes which, once approved by the client, meant the remaining 11 designs would conform to the same look and design.

 

When all our English copy (about 12,000 words) had been finalised and proofed, it was sent for translating into Welsh: the A4 maps themselves were to be entirely bi-lingual, and there would be an accompanying Welsh-only information sheet, as well as an English-only version for each walk, meaning there would be x36 finished PDFs. Once completed, Cygnor Sir Ynys Môn hosted them on the English and Welsh versions of their Visit Anglesey website, and asked us to adapt our designs for the Beaumaris and Holyhead walks for use as litho-printed, bi-lingual A3 leaflets. 

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It’s a rare honour that we are able to take such a holistic approach to a project and be responsible for almost the entire content: we surveyed all the walks, devised two new ones, assessed them, did all the research, wrote all the copy, created all the cartography including 12 route profiles, did all the graphic design, re-designed our English information sheets with Welsh text, and even took 72 of the 76 photographs used in the designs.