I bought a new map today, the 1:1 000 000 IGN map of all of the GR and E routes in France. What else do you do when spending an evening in a London hotel?

Other the the main mountain areas I somehow don’t associate France with walking and yet over years of ambling around there — sometimes on walking holiday and sometimes on, well, just ambling holidays — I’ve constantly found myself finding some long distance footpath or another.

This is a map I first saw about five years ago and it is a mark of uncharacteristic restrain that it has taken me so long to get hold of it. It doesn’t disappoint.

Open up the map and you realise there are GR routes everywhere, indeed there seem to be hundreds of them. As you’d expect there are loads in the Masif Central, the Pyrenees and the Alps yet there are plenty in other less obvious of less touristy areas. There are some great routes that run SW and WSW from the masif that I know would go through some wonderful country, following amazing rivers and passing through villages that may be sleepy now but have hundreds of years of rich history. You could create a great walk in the North, starting at Calais and walking through the first world war country to a great town such as Arras, before moving on to the Somme Valley — which is a wonderfully beautiful place. Just gazing at this for a twenty minutes or so suggests all kinds of options.

Last year I was chatting to LEJOG walker Alan Sloman about another big walk. He mussed on whether it would be possible to walk down through France. I was sure you could and suggested this map. Studying it now I can see some great routes. Paris could be a problem but then there are a couple of routes that walk right through the city, and seem to take a great line through it at that. You could avoid it by going west but that would take you through the great, vast, flat lands around Le Mans. Avoiding Paris to East opens up the option of traveling down through Rheims and then on down through the Burgundy vineyards. From there you could pop on down through the Rhone and cut off through Provence or go West through the Cevennes. Going straight through Paris you could travel through La France Profound, great country where tourists usually fear to tread, before joining the Louis Stephenson trail on its way to Cevennes and my favourite city of Montpellier.

There are so many options? Why don’t we have a map like that? I suppose because we don’t have so many routes.

But French maps can always be frustrating. While still in Stanfords Book and Map shop I had a good look at the coastal footpath around Brittany. Bob and Rose have been going on about this for a while. I reckon a ferry to Roscoff and then a trip West around the wilder coastline would be a great holiday.

Inspired I then sought out some more detailed maps of the area. First off were the 1: 25K maps of Brittany. Lots of detail here although I find these far more difficult to read than the OS equivalents. I was looking for details of campsites but there on none on these maps. Next up I looked at the IGN 1:100 scale maps. Camp sites are on some of these but then the scale is really a little too small to be useful, certainly away from the coast.

That’s the thing about French maps. I could plan a trip and find that I needed three sets of maps none of which did the business on our own.

Sometimes even the jaundiced of us Brits have to admit that the OS make darn good maps!