How We Rank

There are no stars on this site and no ratings. It writes about walks other people run and has never run one, so it has no customers of its own to be rated by, and lifting a booking platform’s average onto these pages would be presenting somebody else’s evidence as this guide’s. Nobody else’s score or review count is reprinted here either: those belong to somebody else’s customers, more than one partner programme forbids displaying them, and a copied count is out of date the moment it is copied.

What replaces it is a stated order, and this is all of it bar the size limit in the paragraph below. First come the cards whose facts are complete and dated — the operator’s name, a from-price with what that price is per, the date that price was read, the operator’s own page it was read off, and the months the walk runs — and inside that group the ones running in the month you are reading in come above the ones that are out of season. After that it is fit to the page you are standing on: a card that names something the page is about comes above one that does not. Fit is read from the card’s own factual fields — its title, the other names in use for it, where it meets and where it leaves from — and never from the description, which is the part somebody could write in order to move it. Cards still level after that are ordered alphabetically by title, and any still level after that by which record was made first, so the sequence is the same every time the page is opened. Nothing commercial enters at any point: no commission, no payment, no featured flag, no placement rank, no boost field, no click count. None of those is even a field on a walk card, so this order cannot quietly begin reading one — somebody would have to add the field first, and that is a visible thing to do.

The size limit is the other thing that decides what you see, and a page claiming to set out the order in full has to name it. One listing works from at most two hundred walk cards, and where the site holds more than two hundred, the two hundred it works from are taken alphabetically by title before any of the rules above are applied. On a site that large a complete, in-season walk whose title falls late in the alphabet is therefore missing from the listing altogether rather than sitting low in it. The cap is there so that a page does not sort thousands of records every time somebody opens it, and this site holds nowhere near that many — but it is an ordering input, it is alphabetical, and nobody should have to read the code to find it out. Separately, each page shows only the first so many of the order, and that number is set per page: a card can be properly ranked and still fall below the line on the page you are looking at.

Two things follow from all that and both are worth saying plainly. This site earns a commission on some outbound links; every page carrying one says so above the first card, and the commission moves nothing up the order and decides nothing about what gets written. And no operator is ever ranked here by being written against: this guide does not name a competitor, compare itself with one, or characterise anybody else’s business. A walk that cannot be sourced is left out, whether there is a commission on it or not.