The best hiking app for the Mendip Hills

The Mendip Hills rise as a limestone plateau over Somerset — Cheddar Gorge and Ebbor Gorge cut into the southern edge, Black Down tops out at 325 m, and swallets and caves riddle the ground below. It's superb walking country with one quirk that trips up phone maps: the open plateau and the gorge bottoms both drop signal, and the field-path network is far denser than any generic basemap shows.

That's exactly the gap NomadTracks fills — a recorder that gets the elevation right and carries the map you actually trust, offline, with no account and no subscription for the core.

Download NomadTracks free on the App Store

What the walking is like

Mendip hiking is a mix of breezy plateau tops (Black Down, Beacon Batch), dramatic gorge rims above Cheddar and Ebbor, and a web of footpaths and bridleways linking villages, reservoirs and Iron-Age hillforts. Distances are modest but the field-path junctions come thick and fast — the difference between the right stile and a dead-ending permissive path is often a single GPS glance.

The map that actually helps here

The reference map for Mendip is the Ordnance Survey Explorer 141 (1:25,000) — every stile, bridleway, access-land boundary and gorge contour. NomadTracks doesn't lock you into a subscription for it: photograph the paper sheet you already own (or scan sections), set a few control points on grid intersections, and the OS map becomes a live offline layer with your blue dot on it. The app shows the alignment accuracy in metres, and OS grid crossings make superbly precise control points.

Offline, private, all day

Everything works with the radio off: recording, your loaded tracks and POIs, and the OS overlay, because it's stored on the device. A full day of Mendip walking records comfortably on one iPhone charge with the screen off — or record from the Apple Watch. Nothing is uploaded: your tracks stay on your device and in your own iCloud, with no account anywhere.

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