Hello and welcome to a new video!
What you are seeing there are a couple of stiles that I took photographs of
on my many walks through county Kilkenny, Laois and so on.
And if you're Irish, you might not think much of them, but I had a friend visiting from Germany,
and she had never seen a stile in her life.
We both don't know what the word is in German,
but never mind that.
So there are quite a few, and I'd say Ireland is probably the country of, like, a million stiles -
way more than ringforts,
and the reason is that people try to keep cattle and other animals out of fields out of graveyards especially,
so you find them a lot around graveyards,
in the walls of the graveyards,
and they can indicate a mass path, because usually
to go to mass people didn't always walk on the road;
they might have gone across fields and you often find
more than one stile in a graveyard wall.
So, that's very interesting.
You also often find them in National Schools in the country,
squeezer stiles, mostly.
If you think back, if you've gone to the National School in the country, you might think back and you might remember them.
And of course, they can be mapped on OpenStreetMap and this video is about this.
First of all let's have a look at the different types of stiles that you can map on OpenStreetMap:
So they're for Ireland, I think, they're basically only three:
the stepover,
the squeezer and the ladder,
And the stepover means that you step over it without squeezing,
and it's usually just ... can be one step like here where it's kind of like a hurdle, and
that's the wooden type. They usually look like this; they're quite modern,
I think, and you find them on hiking trails.
Then this old-fashioned one, stepover
they're made out of ... they're in a wall, and they use horizontal slabs to create the steps, and
there are usually two or three, sometimes just one,
and then sometimes, you can have this vertical slab at the top so it's kind of a stepover on top of a stepover,
but it's all just called a stepover.
and you get those in graveyard walls a lot,
but not just there.
And then the squeezer style is...
it's vaguely V-shaped or Y-shaped,
but they're very narrow at the bottom, and then they're they widen up at the top,
so you can get them made out of stone, so you can add that material as well,
like this one. Again, they're the ones that you used to have at National Schools a lot,
and but also other places,
and then the more modern ones are the wooden ones here.
They also have ... it's kind of a step, and I don't know if that's part of the construction
or if, if ... it's not meant to be part of the barrier; it's just the way it's built or maybe
there's water gathering down here
at the bottom, and that's why they have this raised kind of a beam or something like that.
And the squeezer stiles sometimes locally, apparently in North England,
are also called "hipster stiles",
and that's not because they're used by hipsters,
but probably, I think, because when you go through, you kind of have to turn your hip.
That's just my explanation.
And then - I don't think we have rambler gates in Ireland; i've never seen any of those.
They're like squeezer stiles, but they have movable parts, so you can move them apart to
get through, and then they self-close, and you can lock the mechanism
at the top, but I've never seen them.
And then we have the ladder stile, and they can come in wood like here or
in metal which is down here. There's an example here,
and they're quite common and Ireland along hiking trails as well.
And with the ones that do have steps like this like step over that has two steps
and the ladder ones, you can also add the step count.
So we'll go and start mapping some of them.
And this is where it is.
Johnstown is that way, north west, and this stile is in this little wall
that I've just added a couple of minutes ago.
And you add a node by just double clicking on the wall or the fence - whatever it is.
And you might have to add the "barrier=fence" or "barrier=wall" first,
because a stile in the middle of nowhere doesn't really make a lot of sense,
and so you add that node there, and then you either type in "stile" here,
and it comes up, and I've just done one before, so it's already there,
and then it gives you this menu here,
and it asks you for the type.
So this one is a squeezer stile,
so we can just type in "squeezer" here or just "sq" and then squeezer comes up, and you can choose it,
and down here it adds "stile | squeezer"
or "stile=squeezer",
and if you're using OSMAnd, you have to remember a lot of those.
So this is what you have to remember,
the three types.
And the material here is stone.
And that's that's all you have to do. and then you can save that.
"added stile" and I add the #stiles, and the source would be "survey",
and then I click upload and upload it.
The second example is at Cullahill Church in county Laois,
and it's over here in this wall,
so I'll go in,
and it's somewhere in this wall here,
so I double click on the wall
and make sure I only highlight the node,
and then "stile" already comes up, because I already mapped one before,
so I can click on that, and it is a stepover stile.
It looks like this,
and the material here is stone,
so you can either use this menu here and just choose stone
or start typing in "stone" and then choose it.
Or I could have just typed "material | stone" down here.
And the "step count" ... "step count" is two.
So it doesn't ask you that for the stiles - it would if if there was a steps or something,
it doesn't do that here, and
you can also add the access:
So, bicycles are, for example, not allowed, horses are not allowed,
motor vehicles are not allowed, "foot" is allowed but probably "destination".
Someone who lives there or like a mass path, if you're going to a church -
they're probably not that used anymore -
but if you were going to church on a mass,
path then the "access" would be ... the destination would be the church or the mass rock or whatever, and then its "destination".
And that is that already.
"added stile", and sources: survey or street level photos.
And and I'll upload that.
And the last one I want to show you -
it's the same type. I just... it's such a beautiful example; I didn't want to keep it from you.
so this is what it looks like.
It's on a friend's farm, and it kind of leads into her garden.
And it's here. So, I double-click again on the wall
to create a node
or, if I don't want to do that, I could also choose the point
and then add the point here.
Depends on your preferences.
So that's that, and then I can click on "stile" again, and it's also a "stepover".
The material is also stone, and there are also two steps.
I think that's quite common to have two steps.
I could add that there isn't a handrail.
"handrail=no".
And upload that.
Sometimes, I'm not sure, should I put "survey" as the source or local knowledge,
because once you've surveyed it, you have the local knowledge. I don't know.
So that's all of them added now.
And you see it's here already
What you can also see - I don't know if you knew that, but if you
go into the map layers here on the side,
you get these six options: standard two cycle ones, two public transport ones and the humanitarian.
And they don't all show the stiles, because
they are important for cyclists, because if you're going on a trail,
and there is a squeezer stile or stepover stile,
it's difficult to get your bike across and that's the reason why there's a stile -
you're not supposed to take your bike
or sometimes your horse, and so on the CyclOSM, you can see it is
displayed, and
this is actually the centre of your map that is on your screen is going to be in that preview i don't know if everybody knows that.
So if I move this around a bit, you see that it moves around in the preview as well.
So it is on CyclOSM; it isn't on CycleMap - I don't know why.
It's not on the open transport ones and it's not on the humanitarian.
So they all have their different priorities in
what they show on their map. That's why we do have different map styles.
And they're way, way, way more; these are just the ones that are available on the openstreetmap.org website
I want to show you an example where there is a graveyard that has three stiles in the wall,
and it is in ...
I can't remember what the townland is called, but it's where the sheela-na-gig that is
in Rothe House is from.
Something "more". It's South of Callan, let's see, it's this one here
Coolaghmore. Coolaghmore that's what it's called.
So we have the graveyard is in the middle of a field, or maybe there are two fields,
and people got access like people living up to the North, they got access to this stile,
and people living down here got access through this and so on.
So because ... sometimes you do get graveyards along a road,
and then people just walked in from the road, I suppose.
But this one is in the middle of a field, so people needed to get access to it,
and so there are three stiles in this one here,
in three directions.
There's another one where I think I mapped more than one stile;
let me see... it's near Thomastown
in Kilcolumb which is a holy well as well.
Thomastown ... here.
So, that's the graveyard here.
So access now ... and - did I do a video about that? -
I can't remember. But it's a lovely walk down and it's a really nice site.
There are three, so...
The main access is
either through this gate here or
there's a stile that leads directly into the church ruin.
And then, there's a path it's uphill. This way is uphill,
and there's a stile here and this wall,
and then there's another one over here.
So, as I said you get that a lot in graveyard walls, and because there used to be mass paths
leading into the graveyard
and also in national schools. i haven't mapped a lot of those styles in National Schools,
but that's something for other people to do.
So I hope you liked this. I'll put an overpass turbo query in the video description,
so you can look up the different stiles;
I have them colour-coded,
and you can see which ones do have their type mapped and which ones don't.
And I don't think there's a really regional distribution,
maybe in the material, but that's really more to do with the age of the styles,
because a lot of the newer ones are either made out of wood or out of metal
on hiking trails.
And the old ones are usually ... they're in walls, so they're, you know, they're made out of stone,
whatever material the barrier was,
that's the material they use for the stile as well.
So, I hope you found that interesting. And you're probably gonna see them all over the place now,
because that's what happens: once you know something, you see it everywhere.
The friend that lives out near Bennettsbridge walked a lot during lockdown, because she had her 5k,
and that's when she also collected all these lovely field names,
and she says there are loads and loads and loads of stiles that she never saw before -
first of all, because probably she didn't walk as much, but it's just ... you have this heightened
sensibility for them and then you see them all over the place. And I hope
you do that as well now.
And if you like this video, please watch other videos of mine,
and more importantly
go out and map stuff.
And I think stiles are a good way to start, because they're fairly easy to do
and you can't do much damage.
I mean don't make them up, just because you want to map stiles.
You have to go and map ground truth,
but you know, if you take a child along - and summer holidays are almost over -
but it might be interesting to show them you know in their local area.
You won't get a lot of them in towns; you might get them in parks,
but not as much as out in the country, obviously.
So thank you for watching, and I hope to see you in the next one.
Bye!