WAB (the Worked All Britain award) is this year celebrating its 50th anniversary. In relation to this they are running several extra awards. Of particular interest is the WAB Golden Squares Award.
WAB squares are the 10-km squares of the Ordnance Survey British grid (and similarly in GI, or the 10-km MGRS grid squares in GJ and GU). The WAB square is obtained by discarding all but the first digits of the easting and northing numbers from the grid reference. For example my local summit, G/SP-001, at grid SK 084875, is in WAB square SK08.
So what’s special about a Golden Square?
This is any 10-km WAB square for which the number part is ‘50’.
Now we come to the SOTA part. Which SOTA summits are within this set of Golden WAB Squares…?
I grabbed all the UK & CD summits from the summitslist.csv download into QGIS (actually any ordinary spreadsheet would do), extracted the WAB squares using simple string operations on the GridRef1 values, and then selected only those which end in ‘50’. Here is the result:
| SummitCode | SummitName | GridRef | WAB Square |
|---|---|---|---|
| G/SE-011 | Wilmington Hill | TQ 548034 | TQ50 |
| G/SP-017 | Billinge Hill | SD 525014 | SD50 |
| G/TW-001 | Urra Moor - Round Hill | NZ 594015 | NZ50 |
| G/TW-002 | Cringle Moor - Drake Howe | NZ 537029 | NZ50 |
| GI/SM-020 | Crockdooish | C 529024 | C50 |
| GM/CS-059 | Meall na h-Aisre | NH 515000 | NH50 |
| GM/ES-068 | Craiglich | NJ 533054 | NJ50 |
| GM/SI-161 | Sgurr nan Caorach | NG 593030 | NG50 |
| GM/SI-195 | Valla Field | HP 584079 | HP50 |
| GM/SS-023 | Ben Ledi | NN 562098 | NN50 |
| GM/SS-134 | Meall Gainmheich | NN 509095 | NN50 |
| GM/SS-207 | Beinn Dearg | NN 589038 | NN50 |
| GM/SS-223 | Craig of Monievreckie | NN 547020 | NN50 |
| GW/SW-036 | Mynydd Sylen | SN 515080 | SN50 |
And here they are on a map:
Basemap ©Crown copyright 2019 Ordnance Survey. Media 009/19
Note the usual caveat about coordinates and activation zones. I haven’t checked, but it might be possible to activate some of these summits from an adjacent square (i.e. not the golden one). Likewise there could be other summits which, whilst not recorded as within a 50 square, perhaps have an AZ stretching over a 50 square boundary. So do check.
Anyway, just a bit of fun. Helen and I activated G/SP-017 recently, but it turns out that’s the only Golden Square summit anything like local to us.
Activating all of the WAB Golden Square summits (14 of them) over 2019 looks like quite a challenge. For example, GM/SI-195 is the second-most northerly GM summit, whilst G/SE-011 is right down on the south coast.
…few days before