How to use the route planner

What does the route planner do?

The route planner is a tool to help you plan your walking, cycling and accessible trail routes.

It aims to present you with a suggested route according to your requirements in Morecambe Bay.

Example 1: A circular bike ride from my preferred start point.

I want to go for a bike ride from my home in Grange-over-Sands via a nice café. I like to know where the loos are when I’m out. I don’t want to go too far and be out for less than 2 hours.

How do I do this?

1. From any page within the website, click the orange route planner button on the top right-hand side which will take you to the route planner page.
2. On the route planner page, you will see the left-hand sidebar to enter your requirements, or click the map on the place where you want to start your walk or ride. You may need to click the map to zoom in a little first, then click your exact start point. You can also enter a post code if you prefer.
3. For the example above, enter ‘Grange-over-Sands’ into the ‘starting at’ box. As you type, a dropdown list will appear, so make sure you click the right place.
4. As you want to come back to your start point, click ‘circular’.
5. You will see two sliders – choose either the time you want to cycle for, or the length of ride. Use your mouse to hover on the slider button – you will see that a hand appears, click on it, and slide it up and down to choose what you want. The route you are presented with, will not be exact but as close as possible.
6. With this example, you want to go on a route with a café, and you want to see where the loos are, and for them to be on your route as well. To do this, click the button which says ‘Travel via a point of interest’.
7. You will then see a box which appears on the map, and you can hover over the icons to see what they are. Click the ‘toilets’ icon, and the ‘food and refreshments’ icon. Then click ‘Plan circular route’
8. The cycling route is then generated for you to view. If you want to see where any other points of interest are in relation to your map, click the points of interest button in the right-hand bottom corner of the screen.
9. To get more detailed information on local businesses and services for walkers and cyclists, click the ‘Featured locations’ button. They are shown with a star. If you click on the star, the business details will pop up.
10. If you want to see the route on a satellite map, or specific cycling map, you can select the one you want from the 'map style' button on the right-hand side.

Example 2: A linear walk or cycle route from my preferred start point to where I want to go.

I want to walk from Arnside to Warton village and it would be useful to go via a shop to buy a picnic, and I’d like to know if there is anything interesting to do along the way.

How do I do this?

1. From any page within the website, you can click the orange route planner button on the top right-hand side which will take you to the route planner page.

2. On the route planner page, you will see the left-hand sidebar where you can enter your requirements.

3. Click A-B in the left-hand bar, then either click the location on the map where you want to start, or enter ‘Arnside’ (click it in the drop down menus when it appears after you start typing)

4. Then write Warton village in the ‘finishing at’ box and click plan route.

5. When the route appears on the map, you have the choice to cycle a route (via the fastest, balanced or quietest cycle route, or choose ‘walking’). In this instance we are going ‘walking’ so click this option.

6. The ‘grey’ line depicts the walking route selected. So now you can use the points of interest button to select what you want to see on the map.

7. If you spot something slightly off the route you want to take in, you can re-plot by adding it as a ‘waypoint’, clicking ‘edit route’ (top left), then ‘plan route’ again.

Leisure routes

If you want to search pre-planned routes for cycling, walking or accessible trails, click 'View Leisure routes' then use the filters so you can see the type of route you want. You can filter these by level of difficulty.

When viewing the leisure routes, you can still use the Points of interest and featured locations buttons to see where things are in relation to the routes.

How reliable are the routes?

The pre-planned leisure routes have been walked, cycled and checked by Morecambe Bay Partnership and take you on legal rights of way. Morecambe Bay Partnership do not own or manage any land where these routes are situated and cannot be responsible for the route conditions, and accidents, loss or damage experienced whilst walking or cycling them.

The route planner makes use of crowd-sourced data from Open Street Maps, the best available data source created by cyclists and others. It provides rich and useful details to plan routes but it does mean that accuracy of the information presented cannot be guaranteed.

We aim to make it easy for you to make informed decisions, but when venturing out on a route provided by this planner, it is your judgement and responsibility for any decision made as a consequence of the information provided here. We aim to check and update information as much as we can and respond to any feedback.

Please read the full terms and conditions of using the website and journey planner here.