About the Authors
We have lived in Lewes in East Sussex for more than 20 years. Its position on the Greenwich Meridian has been of interest to numerous visitors over the years, it is not often that one can stand with one foot in the eastern hemisphere and one foot in the west. One day Hilda conceived the idea of walking up the entire length in England and, as there was no established route, we set about creating one. We began walking out the route in 2007 and the fourth guidebook was finally published in 2010. Two years later we began to place waymarks along the route, a task that has yet to be completed. We have over the intervening years re-walked the whole of the trail and the changes that we found have been included in the latest editions of the guides. However, there continues to be changes to the route which we include in the news and update pages when we get to hear about them. What we discovered was that walking the trail was the easier part and getting the guides published was much harder work. However, the whole experience has been great fun. We have met, or been in touch with, many interesting and helpful people; discovered lots of fascinating things along the way and learned a quite a lot about the publishing industry.
About the Greenwich Meridian
Charles II commissioned the Royal Observatory in 1675 and John Flamsteed was appointed as the first Astronomer Royal. It was his diligence in creating, over the next 40 years, the most complete set of star tables at that time, which established Greenwich as the prime observatory in the world. By the 19th century the majority of charts for sea going trade used Greenwich as their zero degrees longitude (or prime meridian), but many countries used other longitudes. France, unsurprisingly, had their prime meridian running through Paris. It was only in 1884 that this problem of multiple meridians was finally resolved at a conference in America when Greenwich was agreed as the Prime Meridian for the world and with it came the creation of Greenwich Mean Time, from which all the world took its time.
About the Waymarks
We have placed waymarks along all of the rural parts of the route and in many towns and villages and they look like this -
While long stretches of the route do have waymarks, there are no waymarks at present through Ashdown Forest, London and towns and villages in West Sussex, Essex, and Lincolnshire. See the section on the News page for more details about where we are up to with placing waymarks.
Header Photo: South Downs in Spring