Nobody has ever had a decent list of where you can hack. Riders work it out themselves, one ride at a time, and then it stays in their heads. This is how it gets out of them.
If you already ride somewhere good, you already have what BridleNav needs. Send it over, and the next rider who boxes up near you doesn’t have to guess.
Here is the honest picture. Green is somewhere a rider would find something today. Everything else is a county where somebody is going out this weekend and BridleNav has nothing to offer them.
If your county has a dashed line round it, you are not one of many. You would be the first, and the first route somewhere new is worth ten in the Peak District.
Public bridleway, byway, road or a path open to everyone. Not a field a farmer lets you cross, because that permission doesn’t travel to the strangers who will ride it on your word. This is the one thing we cannot check for you, and the one thing we ask you to confirm.
Where you actually leave the lorry, what the surface is like, and whether a trailer will turn. A postcode often drops somebody at the wrong end of a long lane, so we ask for the what3words square instead.
This is the fiddly one, and it is also the whole point. BridleNav reads your words out loud as the rider approaches the junction, so “left through the gate by the barn” is worth far more than “turn left”. Gates, water and livestock get marked the same way.
A view, the going underfoot, the parking. They are what makes another rider pick your route, and they are shrunk in your browser before they are sent, which strips the location tag your camera put in them.
Most riders who track their hacks already have the hard part sitting in an app.
A GPX file out of Equilab, Strava, OS Maps, Footpath or a Garmin. In Equilab it’s on a ride’s Summary page; in Garmin Connect it’s Export to GPX. If you’ve never tracked a ride, record your next one in BridleNav instead and share it from the app when you’re home.
Drag the start forward so the route doesn’t begin at your own yard — what you cut off never leaves the page. Then we show you where your line turns, and you write what you’d want said out loud at each one.
Every route is read through by a person before it goes anywhere near the app. Nothing is published automatically, and if something doesn’t look right we come back to you rather than guess.
About ten minutes for your first one, and rather less after that.
Every shared route carries a badge saying it came from a rider, with your name on it — or your horse’s name alongside yours, if that’s how you’d rather be known. If you’d sooner not be named at all, leave the name blank and the route goes up anonymously. Nobody has to put themselves on the internet to be useful.
“We did write a couple of books for the North East to help people try and find somewhere to hack, as no one really had any idea of the locations.”
A rider who sent us his first route this weekThat is the whole problem, in one sentence, from somebody who went and wrote two books about it. You don’t have to write a book. One route will do.
Not ready to send one yet?
One email from me the day BridleNav goes live, and nothing else. No newsletter, and your address goes nowhere near anybody else.