Introduction to Wednesday Walks collected data

The following pages show the records of the Wednesday Walkers, an informal group originally composed of folk who retired when the National Coal Board Research Centre at Stoke Orchard closed. Since then other (carefully vetted!) people have been allowed to join the walks, and many of the original participants have died. Dorothy joined in the new millenium and, when we became a couple, Rowland also participated.

The group has met for a walk on almost every Wednesday morning since 1987, usually having a lunch at a convenient pub after the walk. Sometimes in the early days they would have a longer walk in a more remote location, bringing a packed lunch.

The bulk of the data was collected by Jim Carlton. Rowland converted Jim's .WDB files to FileMaker Pro (FMP) via the LibreOffice implementation of Open Office. Then, using Sequel Pro, matching MySQL files were created to serve this website. Once the MySQL files were defined, FMP acted as a user-friendly front-end via ODBC. With all the data already in existence, it was only necessary to re-purpose some of Rowland's existing PHP scripts to allow this extensive collection of information to be viewed with a web browser.

Following Jim's death, recent walks have been recorded by John Fellows, with some input from Rowland. Additional information, feedback, and comments are always welcome.

To list all the walks (a total of 1855 so far) on one web page would be rather unwieldy so they are displayed by calendar year. The pubs visited (454 so far) are listed in alphabetical order of name and location on a single web page. Several have changed names over the years; the list shows all known names, leading with either the current name or what they were called when most recently visited by the group. Sadly, many of the pubs have closed (70) and some have been demolished (9); where known, that status is shown in the list. I have been unable to establish the location of 1 pub (status shown as Unknown).

Most of the walks do not have track plots, since that capability was not available in the early days! But the tracks of 357 of the more recent walks have been logged by Rowland, mostly on various Garmin GPS devices. These track logs have been plotted for this website using the GPXSee application. The height graphs are derived from the altitude recorded by the device (sometimes uncalibrated pressure readings) rather than from the map, and so although the absolute heights can be somewhat inaccurate, the amounts of ascent and descent should be correct. For all of the walks with plots the GPX track files are available for download to your own computer. The link below offers a full listing of all the walks that have track plots and GPX downloads available.

Location data (PostCode and What3Words address) has been entered for all of the pubs (apart from the 1 that I cannot locate). Most pubs also have contact information such as phone number and website entered, where available. The What3Words address will usually be more reliably accurate for finding the pub location than the PostCode; it identifies the pedestrian entrance, the car park entrance, or (where the position of the entrance is not obvious) just the centre of the building.

In the list of pubs, and on the page for each pub, the links to What3Words maps and to pub websites will open in a new tab or new window, depending on your browser preference settings. The link in the Latitude & Longitude cell will take you to the map of pubs, centred on that pub.

If you can add to or correct any of the information shown on these Wednesday Walks pages, please let me know (my contact info is at the bottom of every page).

This page last updated 2024-04-20 23:30. I try to make this page as accessible as possible, by adhering to HTML 4 standards.
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