80 hills in northern Snowdonia - Phil Jones

West of the Conwy valley and north of the Vale of Ffestiniog, this compact corner of Snowdonia is renowned for its mountain scenery and hill-walking attractions. All the A-list tops are found here - Carnedd Llywelyn, Cnicht, Tryfan and of course, Snowdon itself. Includes a CD of over 1,400 photographs and sketch-maps giving a virtual tour of 26 rambler-friendly walks.

If you need a reliable walker-friendly guide to the best that Snowdonia has to offer, look no further. As well as a few easy appetisers, there are 26 walks featured. Escape routes and shorter (or longer) options are also included should stamina levels or the weather require a change of plan.

The free CD provides a virtual guide through every stage of the route - identifying landmarks and junctions to look out for as well as revealing the expanding views available on the way. On your PC back home or on a laptop in a lay-by this guide and accompanying CD will allow you to safely plan and assess every stage of every walk even before lacing up your boots.

80 Hills will help you gain experience and good judgement as well as provide an edge when you first head for the hills. Splendid summits and those less illustrious pearls hidden within this corner of Wales might finally be revealed to those who already think they have seen it all.
Publisher: Llygad Gwalch Cyf

It is notoriously difficult to write clear, unambiguous route instructions for walks on the varied and meandering paths of Britain. Phil Jones has achieved this, and more, in this book. He has worked amazingly hard to achieve the most detailed instructions I have ever seen in such a book, and has avoided the pitfalls of using features that might rapidly disappear in the ever-changing countryside. He has devised a very detailed scheme for guiding the user across the hills of Snowdonia, and his knowledge and love of those hills shines through the pages. Snippets of fascinating information festoon the text throughout, and are helpfully differentiated from the route instructions by a grey background and the use of italics. Compass directions and grid references ensure that the user will not get lost, and this methodology will suit hikers who like to refer to a guide book frequently, or load way-marks onto their GPS. The ones I have checked have been consistently accurate. Instructions for reading map references and using a compass are provided for novice walkers and useful alternative routes and short cuts are also differentiated by boxes. The drawback of this detailed, and sometimes discursive approach is that the book is rather heavy for carrying up mountains.

Tucked inside the front cover is a CD that provides a very large number of maps and photographs. In fact, the book should be much enhanced by the CD but, unfortunately, when I loaded it the images were immediately grabbed by my Picasa photo-handling software and displayed in a totally higgledy-piggledy fashion, such that they could not be related to the text. This could be a serious problem since many people use Picasa, and, as far as I can tell, the problem could well exist with other photo packages. On the whole I would have much preferred to see better maps and photographs in the text.

80 Hills represents a serious shot at encouraging people to get out into the countryside, and both experienced and novice walkers will find that they can benefit from this rather novel method of navigating around the glorious hills of north Wales. It is also a personal and unique record of one man's dedicated engagement with one of the best walking areas in the world.
Richard Hartnup @ www.gwales.com