MAPPING from Southampton-based Ordnance Survey is set to take on an increasingly important role in the future.

Pam Warhurst, chair of the National Access Forum said the mapping will be crucial if the government's wish to encourage greater public access to the countryside is to be successfully implemented.

"Ordnance Survey maps have always been invaluable to walkers, but in the future they will become indispensable to everyone involved in the countryside as the new access policy bites," she says.

"Clarity of information will be the key to the policy's successful implementation whether you are a landowner, farmer, walker or tourist," she said.

"The provision of up-to-date, accurate and well-presented information is going to be vital, and we in the Countryside Agency are already working closely with Ordnance Survey to consider how the necessary information can be presented in an appropriate way."

As well as being chair of the National Access Forum - a group of 17 representatives from many organisations and bodies connected with different aspects of rural life - Pam Warhurst is also deputy chair of the Countryside Agency.

She is the leading national figure responsible for working out how the government's proposed access legislation, which will create a right of access to mountain, moorland, heathland, downland and registered common land areas, can be implemented effectively on the ground.

Ordnance Survey's director of product development, Steve Erskine, welcomed Pam Warhurst's comments. "By covering the whole of Britain with our new series of Explorer maps, and their sister titles in the Outdoor Leisure series, we are helping all those with the countryside at heart, whether they live, work or play in rural areas," he says.

"The maps are designed to be extremely clear, showing detail as fine as the boundaries of individual fields.

"Maps at this 1:25,000 scale have always been favourites with walkers but now that we can combine computer technology with the creative skills of our cartographers, we have been able to add more information than before.

"Whatever the implementation details of the government's access policy, we are committed to completing our Explorer coverage of the entire country."

Converted for the new archive on 25 January 2001. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.