GeoGraph - photograph every grid square

More about me

I first became interested in Geograph in January 2006 when running some teacher professional development courses focused on using images in geography. Link
Like a number of other people who contribute, my initial involvement with the site was to go round capturing `first’ Geographs, though this was a fairly minor obsession at the time.

I continue to recommend Geograph to teachers as the first site they should consult if they want images of the UK. Mainly because all photographs are a decent size for projecting onto an interactive website and all have been contributed under the Creative Commons license. I also encourage teachers to involve their children in contributing images to Geograph via a class project. (The following photographs were all taken in cities where we have run `Action Plan for Geography’ courses for teachers.)

This summer (2008), Geograph has proved a very useful motivator for getting out and about and walking parts of the countryside around our home where we’ve never walked before. By focusing on grid squares where only one or two images have previously been submitted I planned walks to provide a more representative photographic coverage of the local area, which inevitably is green and rural. This has not always been the case however and the super abundance of public footpaths in the area (I doubt whether there are more per square kilometre anywhere else in the country), probably reflects the highly industrialised nature of this area in the past, where small bell pits, drift mines, iron stone workings and stone quarries littered the countryside.

Ours is also an area of grand country estates where land owners, grown rich on the hidden mineral wealth and on the backs of ordinary people who dug and mined it, chose some of the finest views that Yorkshire has to offer on which to build their often substantial country houses.

I’m currently plotting some of the walk routes using Google Maps and will post web links to these as they are developed.