Welcome to TRAIL

Hello! Right, so I'm going to kick off our little celebration of the UK’s most exquisite square kilometres now, with the one on the cover. Anyone know where that is? It’s standing on the nose of Buachaille Etive Mor’s south-west top Stob Na Doire, at the moment that view to the lost world of Loch Etive opens up. Big hill, crags, enough room for a bivvy, a water supply, that view. Sorted. And all inside NN2053.

You might think ‘grid squares! They’re meaningless away from a map!’ You could say that about counties, countries, continents even. The difference is – and this is all the difference in the world – nobody chose where the 210,000-odd 1km grid squares fell. The OS National Grid was positioned with its origin off the coast of Cornwall, and the grid squares just spiralled from there. So when you find a really good one, it’s like you’ve stumbled on a bit of divine intervention from whatever force out there concerns itself with map magic. A little work of art, framed by accident, and containing all the goodness an outdoors lover needs. The brief for the minds that fed into this piece, which starts on page 50, was: ‘if you were to go and inhabit/explore one grid square forever, where would it be?’ As such we has a mix of scrambly squares, campy squares, pubby squares and the odd one with a mix of all. It’s fun to think about grid squares like that – it sort of refocuses you. So go on, rummage in a map and think about what really matters to you. You might be surprised. And whatever magic guided the Ordnance Survey’s hand... well, we should all be grateful. Thanks, Luke Skywalker. Simon Ingram, editor (Twitter @MrSimonIngram)