Aug 1, 2021
Applying Naismith’s Rule To Your Land Navigation
A simple guideline for planning your journey time when out hiking
William Naismith was a Scottish mountaineer born in 1856 and died in 1935. He spent pretty much his whole life up in Scotland climbing the hills there and he did a lot! So much so, he became one of the founders of the Scottish Mountaineering Club and devised this rule that we call ‘Naismith’s rule’
What is Naismith’s Rule?
For starters it’s not really a rule, more of a guideline. Naismith came up with a formula for trying to work out how long it would take to walk from A to B. We still use this method today and a lot of digital mapping services use this formula built into their route planning tools.
Naismith original rule:
- 1 hour to walk 3 miles on flat ground.
- 1 hour of extra time for every 2000 feet of ascent.
- No extra time added for descent
This is all well and good but in this day and age we are well past the miles and feet in our mapping and very much in the metric world. So to modernise this ‘rule’ it would be as follows.
- 1 hour to walk 5 KM on flat ground.
- 1 hour of extra time for every 600 metres of ascent
- Still no change for decent.
This rule applied to a person of an ‘average’ walking pace and fitness. This is why the ‘rule’ is really a guideline in the fact that it can be manipulated to your own personal levels of fitness. The only way you’ll get it spot on to you is to get out there walking and test your own walking times.
Below is a screenshot from a video I produced of this subject. I’ve shared it with you to help break down this rule even more. It really helps to relate it more to hillwalking and using the map.
Breaking it down to 1 KM sections is really useful as the gridlines on a map are spaced 1 KM apart. So, if you are walking 1 KM it would take you 12 mins on the flat ground.
If you’re using a map with a contour interval of 10 metres you know that you have to add 1 minute of extra time to your walk for every contour line crossed. (Remember we don’t add any time to our journey for the descent.)
Now it’s been broken down even more you can see that it’s a really handy guideline while on the move to estimate your journey time from A to B.
I hope this little snippet of information was useful to you. If so, let me know. I’ll see you real soon for more navigation and map reading training. You can also find out more by clicking this link.
