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 | HARVEY original mapping
Come and visit our shop in Doune |
 | What are they doing and why?
It's a misty October morning, temperature around zero, and the HARVEY surveyors are already well on their way at 7.15 a.m. Let's hope the sun breaks through soon because they have more than 25km each to cover before overnighting in a bothy in a remote bit of the Cairngorms. |
 | Creating the base map
The base for HARVEY mapping is created by plotting from air photos. Using a fancy instrument called a photogrammetric plotting machine, an overlapping pair of air photos is viewed, enabling a virtual model of the ground to be created in the machine. Without going into technical details, this provides the operator with a bird's eye view of the terrain. |
 | From this, both ground shape and ground detail can be accurately plotted. It's a time-consuming and intricate process requiring a skilled operator if the ground is to be interpreted correctly. But it has been the technique for high quality topographic map construction worldwide for decades. |
 | The air photos are taken by specially equipped planes - no box Brownie stuck out of a helicopter, this. The biggest obstacle is the weather. You can't have clouds obscuring the picture, so you can sometimes wait months to take aerial photography of places like the mountains of Scotland. |
 | Out in the terrain
The next - and key - stage of the process sends the surveyors out on foot over the terrain. The base map produced by the photogrammetry contains all the physical detail. But it is important that changes that have occurred since the photos were taken are also included. |
 | Farmers put up fences, walkers build (or demolish!) cairns, foresters fell trees, plant new ones and make new forest roads. This is where the field checkers come in. Using GPS-based technology, additional information is surveyed in. |
 | But don't imagine this is a walk in the park. It's fun to be paid to walk the hills, but, ask Pete, Chris, Amanda or Robin, you need to be tough to do the long days over all sorts of terrain in all weathers - and then there's the night in the bothy! |
 | Editing
The hallmark of HARVEY mapping is its clarity and detail. To achieve this, the field checking stage is critical, as also the cartographic editing of the compiled map on the computer afterwards. Skillful map design is fundamental. The picture provided by the map must bring out the most important information first, and the map must have a careful balance between amount of detail and legibility. Too much information, or information at the wrong degree of prominence, can make a map that is otherwise accurate, quite useless because it is an illegible muddle. |
 | The finished product
HARVEY has been making high quality maps for outdoor recreation for 30 years and has coverage of the popular walking areas of the UK. HARVEY mapping is used by many Mountain Rescue Teams of upland areas because of its clarity and detail. Have fun with your HARVEY map! It is a work of art, as well as a technical piece of safety equipment. We enjoyed creating it. We're sure you'll enjoy using it. |
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