Dad's managing to do some mapping. This is good news. As I was saying before, trying to teach dad to map was something which could go either way. But he's started emailing me with questions, so maybe he's got the bug. What's more, he might even be persuading my uncle to join in. OAP viral marketing!

I sketched in a bunch of rivers around the head of the Holme valley as part of our Holmfirth mapping over Christmas. As well as looking quite pretty, it seems these are useful for countryside footpath mapping, giving something to frame things, rather than just a blank slate.

Dad emailed me last night asking me to do the same thing for the next valley over, and more of the area around where my uncle lives. So I dived into Potlatch and did a bit of river sketching from the out-of-copyright NPE maps. Then I fired an email to dad with links to the live rendered map Osmotherly and the head of the Colne Valley. Minutely map updates are proving quite useful for coordination/explanation by email.

Of course sketching rivers from NPE is a task Steve8 was beavering away at quite spectacularly all along the west coast. Some information on this at WikiProject United Kingdom Waterways#Rivers.

I've been starting with the tips of the branches, putting these in as waterway=stream and working downwards. Not quite sure when the correct time to switch to waterway=river is (can't really see how wide a stream is when looking at NPE maps)