May I wish a Safe and a Happy New Year to all our customers. We certainly appreciated your business in 2011 as it's not a particularly easy time to be running a small business. We experienced quite a decline in cartographic work for various public bodies during the year, budgetary cutbacks and constraints etc. Previously this work has helped to support us in the long term process of developing maps for Dublin & Wicklow etc., but now the shoe is on the other foot and map sales are helping to keep the other side going! Our targets for 2012 are along the following lines:

1) Bring a digital version of our Dublin & Wicklow upland mapping to market. This has proved to be a complex area, the challenge is to get the mapping running on a quality GPS unit, whilst maintaining a reasonable return for the effort in surveying the map content, at a reasonable end cost to the customer.. We are soon to test a product on the Satmap device and may well have a solution up & running for early in the New Year. We've used GPS map devices extensively for survey work and they bring a whole new dimension to the craft of hill navigation.

2) Produce walking guides for Wicklow. Work has suspended on this over the winter period but we'll get back in step during the spring and continue the process of identifying and writing up loop walks. These will most likely be published in book form, though I haven't ruled out some sort of web publishing, phone mapping etc.

3) Publish a map of Mount Leinster, Blackstairs and the Barrow Valley. I've been working on this for the past few months as time allows. The plan is to produce a 1:25,000 scale map, printed both sides of the sheet. A considerable amount of work has been done both in terms of fieldwork and collecting placenames but there remains a few months work yet! I don't anticipate quite the same level of demand for this map but it's worth doing well and I'm enjoying making quite a few interesting discoveries about this lesser known region.

Thanks again for your support and perhaps we'll meet on the hills or in some field, forest or bog in 2012.

Barry Dalby