St Davids Walk-equipment

The St Davids Walk
St Davids to Bangor
Equipment page

Updated September 2 2009

Obviously you will need all normal walking equipment: waterproof outer shell, warm inner clothes, a good pair of boots, a rucksack, suitable maps, a waterproof map case, a compass or GPS or, if you can afford it, a Road Angel or equivalent - see below The notes which follow deal with special equipment particularly relevant to this terrain:

Maps

Do not consider trying this walk without a set of appropriate Ordnance Survey 1:25000 maps or their equivalent on a Road Angel or similar device (see the next section for details of this option) The 25000 maps show useful information like field boundaries (allowing you to see, for example, which side of a hedge the path officially runs) and are much more suitable for the walker than the 50000 series. These 25000 maps used to be very expensive but all the sheets you will need are now available either as Explorer or (for the most popular walking areas) the Outdoor Leisure Maps

You will need the following sheets::
Outdoor Leisure 35 North Pembrokeshire (double sided)
Explorer 185 Newcastle Emlyn
Explorer 186 Llandeilo & Brechfa Forest
Explorer 187 Llandovery (double sided)
Explorer 213 Aberystwyth and Cwm Rheidol
Outdoor Leisure 23 Snowdonia: Cadair Idris Area (double sided)
Outdoor Leisure 18 Snowdonia, Harlech and Bala (double sided)
Outdoor Leisure 17 Snowdonia and Conwy Valley (double sided)

These cover the whole walk from South to North. They may be obtained on the web or from any reputable bookshop.
If you like gadgets consider a Road Angel Adventurer. With one of these you can create your own 25000 map from Memory-Map covering the whole walk at a total cost of £250 plus £83. Details below.

A GPS or Road Angel Adventurer

Navigation can be tricky in parts of rural Carmarthenshire where rights of way are exceedingly indistinct; also in the Elenydd between Llandovery and Machynlleth if you are unlucky enough to have very low cloud. A small GPS (Global Positioning Device) is extremely useful. You can currently (April 2009) buy a new, basic Garmin eTrex on the net for about £70 - try Google - prices are coming down all the time).
A basic eTrex has NO BUILT-IN MAPS but can be held in the hand and, like the familiar car gps, uses the 24 American direction-satellites 11000 miles above the surface of the earth to fix your position to within about 5 metres. It gives an instant grid reference for your present position and, as you walk, will show you the current direction to any point whose grid reference has been previously keyed in. (It will remember these points, even when switched off) If you are a good navigator it will probably never save your life but it will save time and remove uncertainty in forest and on featureless high ground in cloud.

If you want built-in maps, don't buy a more expensive Garmin. You should go for a device which allows you to see proper 25000 OS maps and the choice is still fairly limited. Memory-Map offer a splendid range of maps and include a custom arrangement which allows you to define precisely the area you want to cover. Their website offers the Road Angel Adventurer, a light, waterproof device which will display these maps and show your position like the device used in a car. The Road Angel has two modes of operation, either in the car with the usual, mildly irritating, verbal instructions, or when walking, in which case the 25000 maps are displayed. In this second mode it thankfully does not talk to you. (Click Here for information about the Road Angel and here for information (near the bottom of a very long page) about custom maps. You can make a custom strip-map of the whole of this walk for £83 and the Adventurer will cost you £250 including maps of all the National Parks at 50000. Against this consider your potential saving of £50 or so in paper maps.

A word of warning: The Road Angel works fine straight out of the box with 50000 maps of all the National Parks but using the state-of-the-art facilities for buying sections of the 25000 maps on-line needs some patience as the technology is developing so fast that the documentation is, at the time of writing (Summer 2009) lagging behind the software. There is also a limit on the length of time the built-in re-chargable battery will run (about 7 hours if you use power-saving settings) although a back-up pack can be easily obtained from just mobile

Footbeds

If you are one of those lucky people who never get sore feet, skip this section. Otherwise seriously consider getting a pair of Superfeet footbeds. These fit inside your boots and, if custom-made (by an amazing process involving having plastic bags fastened to your feet and all the air sucked out) result in your body weight being divided equally on all parts of the soles of your feet. I have personally never been so comfortable and will now never wear anything else. There are now about 30 places in the UK where you can get the custom-fitted ones. Try the web site of anatom where the Superfeet section contains a list of the stockists offering the custom footbeds (called insoles on the site).

A Brasherstick

Brashersticks are designed to reduce the load on your knees (and hips) and are intended to be used in pairs. Nevertheless, a single Brasherstick, carried collapsed in your rucksack, could prove extremely useful as a third point of support when crossing bog and turbulent streams.

A mobile phone

Although sometimes unusable in the valleys of central Wales, we found a mobile phone extremely useful. We were always able to contact friends, taxis, etc during the middle of the day when we had achieved some height.