What map for roads and tourist information

BlackWizard

I'm looking for a map which shows good road details and also shows things like castles and caravan camping sites.

I bought the Ireland touring map from OSI https://shop.osi.ie/Shop/Products/StockedItemsWH03/PID-11005%28StockedItems%29.aspx but it's not great. It doesn't have the castles and views on it. It does show some campsites but not many.

Would the Ireland tourist maps be good from OSI? https://shop.osi.ie/Shop/Products/StockedItemsWH03/PID-41004%28StockedItems%29.aspx

Also if anyone knows of a good site which lists campsites that would be great too. Alan Rogers is perfect, but it's missing many sites. http://alanrogers.com

Orion

http://www.eastwestmapping.ie/ has maps that show areas of interest including campsites - however they only cover Wicklow and Dublin mountain areas.

http://www.camping-ireland.ie/ has a good list of caravan/camping sites.

BarryD

Views are very subjective - I don't think I've seen any general road maps of Ireland with views marked in any systematic way. Ditto campsites - these are sparse to put it mildly in Ireland, mainly south & west coasts. The Camping Ireland site listed above should give best advice on current sites as a good many have closed in recent years.

Other than that, there was a series of maps for Ireland at 1:250,000 scale - the Holiday Series with four sheets covering the country. I always find these a good general road map.

BlackWizard

I think I'll get the holiday series. I want more of points of interest than views. It's just so that I can see things on the map other than just roads. I'd like to see castles and famour tourist areas.

BarryD

Yes, that's the best series IMHO - though the previous Holiday Series, published back in early 2000s was better I think. Sometime during that decade, OSI decided to 'improve' them and bring them into line with their digital database etc., and as usual the end result has less useful information. You can also buy this for all Ireland in book form as the Road Atlas, https://shop.osi.ie/Shop/Products/StockedItemsWH03/PID-14003(StockedItems).aspx

But I wouldn't be a great fan of road atlases, handy in that all the maps are held together and you don't have to fold and refold a large map. But that's where it stops, if you want to plan a journey of any length, you have to get looking across several pages. Much handier to open the larger sheet and see the totality. Of course, a lot of people use car satnavs now and sales of road maps have plummeted. But satnavs have same problem as atlases, except even more pronounced, in that you can only see a small portion of the map in any reasonable detail at any one time.

There's an analogy with simple arithmetic and use of calculators, where you'll commonly see people reach for a calculator now for easy addition instead of exercising the grey matter. Ditto for car satnavs and navigation.

Carawaystick

I think the OSI road atlas has the key advantage of showing every road in the country on it; so if you're somewhere different and stuck, you'll have the atlas to hand, the Collins and others didn't have every road, so if you were lost and taking the third left ( on the map =/= on the road)

The Michelin maps have views marked with a green band beside them, there's also the michelin green guide for points of interest etc.

BarryD

Carawaystick wrote: »

I think the OSI road atlas has the key advantage of showing every road in the country on it

You could be quite right about Michelin maps - I've only ever used them in France, so must look more closely at their Irish editions sometime.

But the above re OSI is a bit of a sweeping statement and I guess it depends on how you define a 'road'. Even if you take a tarmac surface that is normally open to the public and maintained by the local authority (in theory at any rate, looking at some of the appalling roads around Wexford :mad:) - there is a grey area in terms of minor roads on OSI road mapping. I've seen plenty marked that you wouldn't drive a normal car along, for choice.

hmmm

The map on the back of my AA manual thing has a road atlas with scenic areas shaded in green.