South West Coast Path Maps and GPX: OS Sheets, App, Guidebooks

For most of a day on the South West Coast Path the navigation is the simplest there is: keep the sea on your right and follow the acorn. The map matters at the edges of that — where the route turns inland at an estuary, threads through a town, or leaves the coast on a detour because a ferry is not running — and it matters as a record, because this is a path people walk over years and like to see finished on paper. This guide sets out what exists: the Ordnance Survey sheets, the booklets and guidebooks that reprint or redraw them, the GPX files, and the free app.

The Ordnance Survey sheets

Ordnance Survey's Explorer series is the walkers' map at 1:25,000 — 403 sheets cover Great Britain, with the Outdoor Leisure sheets, numbered OL, identical apart from the numbering and covering the popular areas. The Landranger series at 1:50,000 is the general-purpose map, 204 sheets, with less detail. Both are also sold digitally through the OS Maps app, where a subscription lets you download Explorer and Landranger mapping to the phone for offline use.

The National Trails maps page lists 17 Explorer sheets for the South West Coast Path. Sheet numbers and titles are as listed there; the stage pairings are approximate and worth checking against the sheet edges before you buy, because some stages cross from one sheet to the next.

Seventeen sheets is a lot of paper and a lot of money for a walk most people do in one-week pieces, so the practical question is which one or two cover your section. Padstow to St Ives is on 106, 104 and the edge of 102; Marazion to Falmouth is 103 and 105; the Dorset week is 116 and OL15. The itineraries guide lists the sections; run a finger down the table.

Map booklets on OS mapping

Cicerone's answer to the sheet problem is three map booklets that reprint the 1:25,000 OS Explorer mapping in a strip along the path: Vol 1 Minehead to St Ives, Vol 2 St Ives to Plymouth, Vol 3 Plymouth to Poole. Volume 1 runs to 112 pages; each is £12.95. You get the OS detail — contours, field boundaries, the rights of way — without the sheet margins, at the cost of not seeing far inland, which matters only on a detour.

The guidebooks

Two publishers cover the whole route, in different shapes.

Cicerone — Walking the South West Coast Path: National Trail from Minehead to South Haven Point by Paddy Dillon, fourth edition, published 16 March 2026, 352 pages. It divides the path into 45 stages of roughly 12–38 km, with 1:50,000 OS mapping in the book, elevation profiles, accommodation listings and public transport, and comes with downloadable GPX files. One volume for the whole path is its advantage for an end-to-end walk; the mapping is the coarser Landranger scale, which is why the three map booklets exist alongside it.

Trailblazer — three parts, each with the publisher's hand-drawn walking maps at just under 1:20,000, town plans, and places to stay and eat along the way, with GPS waypoints downloadable from the publisher's website.

Note that Trailblazer's mileages are the publisher's own for each part; the official figure for the whole path is 630 miles (1,014 km). Section walkers usually carry the one part they need. Whole-route walkers face the choice between one Cicerone volume and three Trailblazer parts, and it comes down to whether you want OS mapping or the larger-scale drawn maps with the accommodation detail on the page.

Both publishers' stage divisions differ from the 52 official day-stages used on this site — Cicerone uses 45 — so when comparing a guidebook day with a stage page, match the place names rather than the stage numbers.

GPX files

A GPX file is the route as a line of coordinates that any mapping app or GPS device can display and follow. There are several sources for this path:

• Every stage page on this site carries a GPX download for that stage, and there is a full-trail file as well. The stage distances and ascents on the pages are measured along those same lines, so the file you download is the one the numbers were calculated from.
• National Trails provides a GPX from the Create Your Own Trip page on its South West Coast Path section.
• Cicerone supplies downloadable GPX files with the guidebook.
• Trailblazer supplies GPS waypoints for each of its three parts from its website.

A GPX line is only as good as the day it was drawn. Ferry crossings and tidal detours are the places a file and the ground disagree, because the official line assumes the boat is running. The ferries page lists the 17 crossings; when one is closed, you are on a detour the file does not show.

The free app

The app on this site carries all 52 stages offline — maps, waypoints and the audio guides download to the phone, which matters on cliff paths with no signal. It shows your position on the route and alerts you when you leave the line, including on inland detours and ferry crossings; it maps the taps, springs and village stops that the water guide is built from; it has the elevation profile and the surface breakdown for each day; and its route builder imports GPX tracks, so a guidebook's file or your own can be loaded alongside the stages. It is free to download on iOS and Android.

It is not a reason to leave the paper at home. The app page carries its own warning — always carry a map and compass and check the weather and conditions before you set out — and the reasons are the ordinary ones: a flat battery on a long day, salt water, a dropped phone on the steps above a cove. The packing list puts a power bank in the day pack and a map alongside the phone.

Waymarking on the ground

The path is a National Trail, waymarked throughout with the acorn on signposts, stiles and gates, and finished in 1978. On the open cliff the acorn and the sea do the work. The places to have the map out are the ones the beginners' guide names: estuaries, where the route turns inland to a ferry or a bridge; towns, where the acorns thin out among street signs; and detours, where a closed ferry, a firing range or a tidal crossing has put you on a line no waymark follows. Lulworth to Worth Matravers through the ranges and St Ives to Pendeen over the boulders are the two days where the map is a safety item rather than a convenience.

What to carry, in one line

For a section: the one or two Explorer sheets or the Cicerone booklet that cover it, the Trailblazer part or Cicerone volume if you want a book, the app with the stages downloaded, and the GPX from the stage pages on a second device or a watch if you have one. For the whole path: the same, one section at a time, posted ahead or swapped at home between trips — nobody carries 17 sheets up the Hangman.