The best hiking app for the Blackdown Hills
The Blackdown Hills straddle the Devon–Somerset border: a quiet National Landscape of steep beech-hung combes, spring-line villages, greensand ridges and far views to the Quantocks and the sea. It's some of the least-crowded walking in the South West — which also means the fewest waymarks and the patchiest phone coverage in the deep valleys.
NomadTracks is built for exactly that: an honest recorder that keeps running offline and puts the Ordnance Survey map on your screen with your position on it.
Download NomadTracks free on the App Store
What the walking is like
Blackdown hiking is intimate rather than grand — sunken lanes, deep wooded combes, ridgetop commons and a dense lattice of footpaths between farms. The steep little valleys are where signal disappears and where a recorded track and a live map earn their keep, because one green lane looks much like the next.
The map that actually helps here
The Ordnance Survey Explorer 128 (1:25,000) is the sheet for the Blackdowns — field boundaries, permissive paths, access land and the contour detail that makes the combes readable. Photograph or scan the sheet you own, set control points on grid intersections in NomadTracks, and it becomes a live offline overlay with a metre-level accuracy readout. No OS subscription needed for a map you already have on paper.
Offline, private, all day
GPS needs no signal, and your OS overlay lives on the device — so recording and navigation both work in the deepest combe. A day's walking records on one charge with the screen off, or from the Apple Watch, and every track stays private on your device and in your own iCloud, with no account.
Related
- The NomadTracks hiking tracker — all the features
- Use park & area maps offline with a live GPS position
- How to georeference a paper map