Feature Spotlight: Trail Discovery

The hardest part of planning a walk is often the first five minutes. You've got a free afternoon, the forecast looks reasonable, and your boots are by the door. But deciding where to go, committing to a route you haven't done before, takes longer than it should. The internet gives you too much and too little at once: top-ten lists you've already read, forum threads from 2019, a Google Maps pin that might be a car park.

Trail Discovery in TrailWise was built for this moment.

A feed that already knows you

Open Discover and the first thing you see is a personalised homepage, not a blank search box. The recommendations are drawn from your hiking history: your typical distance, preferred difficulty, and the regions where you're most active. Fell groups you're already working through sit at the top with a progress bar, and trails that count toward your next unbagged summit appear underneath.

If you've logged a dozen Wainwrights but haven't ventured into the quieter northern fells, the feed starts surfacing routes there rather than sending you back to Helm Crag again. It's the result of the app knowing what you've done and pointing you at what you haven't. The recommendations update daily, so returning a week later will show you something different.

Start from a location, not a list

Alongside the personalised feed, there are two ways to anchor your search geographically. Near Me activates automatically when TrailWise has location permission, pulling up curated routes starting close to where you are. Drop Pin lets you tap anywhere on the map, whether that's a car park you're staying near, a village you'll pass through, or a valley you want to explore, and surfaces trails from that point.

Both draw from the same pool of 1,000+ curated UK routes, covering everything from short valley circuits to multi-fell ridge days.

Seven filters, any combination

When you want more control, the filter panel stacks up to seven constraints independently. Difficulty runs Easy through Very Hard. Distance takes a min/max range in kilometres. Elevation gain works the same way, so you can ask for short walks with big ascents or long valley routes that barely climb. A minimum rating threshold cuts out anything below a score you're comfortable with. A fell group filter narrows results to routes that count toward a specific list: Munros, Nuttalls, Wainwrights, and others. Sort by popularity, highest rated, or shortest first. Filters stay put when you change the sort order, so you can shift the ranking without losing your constraints.

Ratings worth reading

Each trail carries scores across five dimensions: overall quality, scenery, trail condition, how closely the difficulty label matches reality, and how busy it gets. Every score comes from someone who has actually walked the route. You can read the aggregate across all five before committing, or set a minimum star threshold in the filter panel so anything below your standard doesn't appear at all.

After your own hike, you can add your rating and note the season you walked in. A trail that's well-drained and quiet in September might be a different proposition in February. That context is visible to the next hiker searching the same filters.

Getting a trail into your plans

From any trail detail page you can bookmark the route to your wishlist, ready to turn into a dated trip when the weather aligns. There's also the option to adopt the trail directly into your routes, which copies the polyline and any matched fells into your collection so you can adjust waypoints or stitch it with other sections.

Trail Discovery is available on iOS and Android for premium users. Download TrailWise on the App Store or Google Play, or create a free account to browse on the web.

The next walk is out there. You might as well start looking.