Home What's new Waystone is open. Come and explore.
Waystone is open. Come and explore.
After months of development, Waystone is entering beta — a desktop-first map of 850,000 historic places across Britain and Ireland, each one explained from real records.
After months of development, I'm excited to say Waystone is entering beta — a desktop-first experience, with a mobile version to follow shortly. It works end to end and is genuinely useful as it stands, with some polish and a few features still in the works.
The main point of a beta is to validate the idea. Is this useful? Would you reach for it over Google or ChatGPT? Out on a walk, would it show you things around you that you had no idea were there? That's what I want to find out.
What Waystone is
Roughly 850,000 historic places are marked across the United Kingdom and Ireland — castles and hillforts, yes, but also the field shelter, the holy well, the wreck offshore, the pillbox in the hedge. Tap any one of them and Waystone tells you what it is, drawn from real heritage records rather than invented on the spot.
What's in this first version
- A heritage map of Britain and Ireland — 850,000 places, from the famous to the forgotten.
- Source-grounded narration — tap a place and read what it is, written from real records.
- Ask Waystone — follow-up questions about a place, answered from the same library.
- A choice of voice — read in an academic register, as a story, or plainly. You set the tone; Waystone follows.
What it doesn't do yet
Better you hear the rough edges from me than find them yourself.
It's desktop-first, by design. Pushing updates to a webpage is far quicker than going through the Apple developer program — where a phone has to be put in developer mode and the app side-loaded, and every update waits on Apple's review before it reaches you. A proper mobile experience is coming; for now the web lets me move fast.
Coverage is uneven. England is richly documented. Ireland has pins but no map yet. Scotland's data-licensing situation makes sourcing relevant documents genuinely difficult. And some places are simply obscure — one site gets pages of source material, the next gets a name and a grid reference. The map tells you what it knows and stops there.
It can be slow occasionally. Future cache expansions will smooth that out.
It's a beta. Things will break now and then. That's expected, and reports genuinely help.
What I'm working on next
The single thing I'm putting all my focus on is expanding the corpus and improving how documents are retrieved. It's by far the hardest part of the product — and by far the one with the most upside. The library you'll experience in this beta is about a tenth the size of the version I'm building next. So if it feels like too little is surfacing for now, that's the reason, and it will get better. I'll tell you here on the blog when the bigger corpus is ready.
Further out: offline regions for the field, spoken narration so Waystone works while you walk, and an Explorer's Journal — a quiet log of where you went and what you found, drawn into an end-of-day account of the ground you crossed.
Who's behind this
Waystone is a passion project, built in my spare time. There's no funding beyond my own income, and things move when I can carve out time to build them. As it grows, I hope to make it a full-time endeavour and take it as far as it can go.
All feedback comes straight to me, and I'll act on as much of it as I can. If you have a question or a suggestion, email me at [email protected] — or easier still, leave a note in the feedback box in the web app.
Go explore.