The South West Coast Path

A breakdown of the 30 minutes spent creating the map.

The last time I put together a breakdown of how I made a 30 minute map it went down quite well. I thought I’d share some thoughts of the most recent map I made. If you haven’t already I strongly recommend you take a look at the #30MinuteMap hashtag on Twitter. There are some gems made each week.

Coming up with the idea of what I wanted to create took more than the allotted 30 minutes. I’d seen a blog by John Nelson who created a trail style map for the Appalachian route across Eastern USA. I had also recently been to Devon on holiday and took inspiration of creating a similar map from the South West Coast Path.

1 to 5 Minutes

I grabbed the National Trails, National Parks, AONBs, County Boundaries and World Terrain layers all from the Living Atlas.

I spent about 2 minutes wasting time trying to find the South West Coast Path route to make sure the layer was correct. I should probably have trusted that it was as it was on the coast…

Once I had these loaded intoArcGIS Pro, I was able to export the South West Coast Path, Dartmoor and the counties I was interested in visualising. This then meant I could clip the AONBs to the County Boundaries. In hindsight I should have also done this for the National Parks as it meant I missed Exmoor completely as I was rushing through.

5 to 10 minutes

I had a basic colour scheme from my Density of OS Open Greenspace map and I just adjusted this slightly to make it darker for the the South West Coast path. I mostly used the symbol attributes (opacity etc) from John’s map. In this blog there are screenshots showing the different options that he was working with. I used these but just chose to use green.

The whole map is mostly one colour with varying opacity and in fact you can really benefit when making 30 minute maps such as this by saving colour schemes within ArcGIS Pro. Find myself coming back and using them more often than not.

10 to 20 minutes

By far the longest stage of the map creation process was adding the points along the South West Coast Path. Typically I would use existing GIS data but it wasn’t available in this case. I didn’t take anytime to look that up.

I used the Create point features along a line tool in order to add the points directly overlaying the coast path, instead of the exact towns inland. I was able to use the distance values between each point, available from the official South West Coast path guide, in order to space out each point. I found this was a great workaround over having to manually place points. More often than not they were placed in nearly the exact location. The problems started occurring when the first value was incorrect near St Ives and I had to do some quick adjustments to the other numbers to make sure it dropped a point at each location.

The process of making sure the points were on top of each waypoint was quite quick:

• Choose a Readable OS basemap, as terrrain was less important here;
• Zoom to point;
• Check if the point is in the correct location;
• Adjust as necessary.

The majority of the points along the line worked well and I probably only needed to make this adjustment for 3/5 of the overall set. Which in the grand scheme of a quick map is pretty good. Still forgot Exmoor though didn’t I.

20 to 30 minutes

Something that always surprises me most about these quick maps is that I spend so long in the Layout view and not dealing with map layers themselves. I’ll try to outline the full 10 minutes in as much detail as possible.

In the Map View:

1. Generate Tesselation (square) — same approach as John. I chose to create this for the current map extent with the whole coastline visible.
2. Point within polygon tool to add a point for the notebook style layout.
3. Copy all locations from the South West Coast Path Guide as text and paste special these into the attribute table of the new point layer created in the previous 10 minutes. These would be used as the labels, I just had to hope each location was spelt correctly. I still haven’t checked.
4. Turn on Labels for all layers — for polygons I placed the label in the centre, for points I placed these as dynamic adjustment. Kept all layers as the default font I already had selected.
5. Remember to turn on all the layers and order them appropriately. For this map the world terrain was acting as a base map however for the creation of all the points and details I had i turned off as it was slowing everything down.

In the Layout View:

1. Add in the Map, activate the map view and adjust so that the entire area fills the page.
2. Add in the North arrow and Scale bar. I then chose to adjust the opacity as these weren’t a necessity. Pasting in an opacity that you were previously using can speed up this process.
3. Write out a title, copying the opacity as before.
4. Copy the title and shrink it. Write down a quick set of details about where the data came from.

Simple as that really… 30 minutes broken down to showcase the creation of the map. To add a few takeaways that I learnt this time around whilst rushing to get everything done.

1. Know the style you want to achieve before you start the map.

2. Stick to similar layers so that you only need to perform one or two searches to find each element of the map.

3. For quickly making a map it can be best to avoid using a base map to speed up the map view.

4. It’s no harm missing things off… No one even mentioned Exmoor being missing…

Once again it would be great to hear your thoughts on the map and if you’ve found this summary useful give it a share on Twitter.

Otherwise the best place to tell me everything wrong about these maps is Twitter – @RobACollins.

The above article contains all my own views, not that of friends, family or my work. The map layers were all available within the Esri Living Atlas.