Choosing a route

A walk goes in the diary when it answers a question. Where does the creek actually become walkable. What is behind those gates. How far can you follow the river before the path gives up. Curiosity first, subject second.

Routes are never chosen because a phrase is popular, because a business asked, or because a neighbourhood is having a moment. We have no traffic targets and no advertisers to please, which is the only reason that is possible.

Walking it

Every piece is walked in full, on one day, by one person. No route here is assembled out of two half walks, and none is written from a map.

• Distance is measured on the ground, then rounded to the nearest quarter mile. If a stretch was retraced because of a closed path, the retracing is counted, because your feet will count it too.
• Time is at an ordinary pace with ordinary stops. It is not a target.
• Weather is recorded because it changes the ground more than the season does.
• Surface matters: gravel, mud, brick, broken pavement and stairs all get named, because for some readers a stair is the difference between a route and a no.

Checking it

Before a piece goes out, three things are verified: that the route is public and open, that the distance matches the record, and that nothing described has closed since the walk.

Where something is likely to change, the piece says when it was true rather than pretending to be permanent. A path that floods will flood again.

Photographs

Made for this journal, on the walk or near it. They show ground, water, brick and weather, and they are never used to make a place look like something it is not. Nothing is composited and no picture stands in for a different place.

Corrections

Printed, not quietly patched. If a fact in a piece is wrong, the correction appears in the piece with the date it was made, and the original wording stays legible enough for a reader to see what changed.

The fastest way to get one made is to write to [email protected] with the piece and the sentence. Corrections are answered before anything else in the inbox.

What this journal never does

1. 1. Accept payment for a walk, a mention, a link or a photograph.
2. 2. Publish a route that has not been walked in full.
3. 3. Take a free anything in exchange for coverage. There is nothing to exchange, since we cover public ground.
4. 4. Rate, rank or score a place.
5. 5. Run analytics, advertising code or trackers of any kind. There are none on this site, on any page.
6. 6. Use somebody else's photographs, or somebody else's words without quoting them plainly.

The one commercial thing

The flight search, on its own page, with its own disclosure. It is the only income this journal has. Nothing about which walks get published, or how they are written, has ever depended on it, and if that ever changes this page will say so before the change is made.