Walking with what3words

The location app that comes with a built-in writing prompt generator

Sunset seen from Tan Hill in the Yorkshire Dales National Park

Hello walkers and writers 👋🏻

Did you try the museum walk yet? If you know any museums or galleries with interesting walking tours – either real life or virtual – please share them with our community by telling us in the comments. So far, we’ve had lots of votes for the V&A, and Foundling Museum in London, Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford, and The Tile Museum in Lisbon. Where’s your fave?

Before I get into this edition’s walk, I should probably say that I’m not connected in any way with the navigation app, what3words. Although word-based apps always get my attention, obvs.

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Walking

Having a map or navigation app when you’re walking in an unfamiliar area, or following an unmarked trail, is essential. And they’re a good backup when walking along well-known, heavily used or signposted paths, too, because signposts can become damaged, overgrown, hidden or taken down. Or you might find the trail blocked by something like a fallen tree or landslide. (Been there, done that. More times than I’d have liked.) So when something like that happens you either have to backtrack or find another route.

I have a few navigation and tracker apps on my phone that I use depending on the type of walk I’m doing. One of my favourites is the Ordnance Survey app because you can use it to follow routes that other walkers have mapped out, you can track your own walks to create your own routes, or just use it to keep track of where you’re going and check you’re not straying from the path. (Been there, done that. More times than I’d have liked.) But you still need some map-reading skills to understand what all the lines, colours and symbols mean. After all, a map is meaningless without knowing the key to reading it. Just ask anyone who’s searched for a stash of long-lost, buried treasure.

what3words is a bit different because it’s about pinpointing locations. They’ve given every 3-metre square in the world a unique 3-word address, so you can share or find any location – from the top of a mountain to your own front door – with just 3 words.

I stumbled upon the idea for my what3words walking game quite by accident because I don’t usually use it when I’m hiking. But now I’m hooked, and it’s something I try on a lot of my walks.

It happened when I was on a sailing and hiking trip on the Norfolk coast. We were having breakfast on the boat and got around to talking about map, navigation and fitness tracker apps. When what3words was mentioned, I opened the app and was happily surprised that one of the 3 words for our location at that moment was food-related:

Bread, eggs, avocado, mushrooms… wait, where are the beans?!

Since then, if I want to add something interesting to a walk, I look at the app to see which 3 words appear in the hope they’ll either reflect what I can see or what I’m doing. And it’s an absolute treat when I can link one or more of the words to what I’m experiencing – like in the photo of the sun setting across the Yorkshire Dales at the top of this post.

Then there’s the spot in Hessle, East Yorkshire, where I stopped to take a photo of the Humber Bridge. I like the idea of a bridge being described as a wide, caked crab. Especially when seen from this perspective where it looks like it’s moving sideways across the wide river Humber:

The Humber Bridge, stretching from the Hessle foreshore across to Barton

Sad fact: 'the.writers.walk’ is not a what3words address. The closest match I found was ‘them.writers.walk’ which is outside Osaka, Japan

Most of the time, the words don’t reflect where I am, what I can see or what I’m doing. But it’s still fun when the words don’t play the game because it just gives me more to think about.

Here’s La Sirena, the mermaid statue by the sea in Sitges, which you’ll find at rinsed.conga.pancakes

La Sirena in Sitges – she’s rinsed the pancakes and will be dancing the conga

So for your next walk, I invite you to join me in my what3words game and see what you find. You’ll need to download the app if you don’t have it – it’s free.

My approach is to check the what3words app whenever I stop for a rest, to re-tie my bootlaces or take in the view. Then if the words mirror…

• Where I’m standing

• What I can see

• What I’m doing

• How I’m feeling

• What I’m thinking, or

• Who I’m with

…I take a photo and make a note of the 3 words – I usually just take a screengrab. It’d be great to see what you find and if you come up with any other prompts like the ones I’ve suggested here.

You can play this game anywhere, so it doesn’t matter what type of walk you try. But a word of caution: You might not want to share the 3 words of any locations you want to keep private. Like where you live or where you buried your treasure.

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Writing

Your writing prompt this time is really simple: use the 3 words that mark the location of your favourite walking spot, or the place where you just had to stop and look around.

Here are a few ideas to get you started:

• Write about what you found at the location and include all 3 words

• Use them as the title of whatever you write

• Write a haiku¹ and include all 3 words

  • If you want to make this more challenging, make sure each of the 3 words is in a different line of the haiku

  • And if you really want to ramp up the challenge, try starting each line of the haiku with each of the 3 words

As ever, I enjoy hearing your stories so please let me know how you found this walking and writing idea in the comments.

Happy walking, writing and navigating,

Sarah

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More from the Writer’s Walk

You might want to pair this walk with Walking in zigzags. That way, if you get lost from all the zigging and zagging, you’ll be able to check where you are in the app.

Walking in zigzags

1. Haiku is a form of Japanese poetry. It’s made of 3 short lines, that do not rhyme, and each line has a specific number of syllables. The first line has 5 syllables, the second has 7 and the third has 5. So the pattern is 5-7-5.