Lynda, Although I have a lot of County OS Atlases I tend to use them for checking place spellings. I find Multimap to be a good site for checking distances and it's route finder also has an option to select Walking as opposed to driving and although it does not then use footpaths - it does give you some idea of the time it would take to walk from A to B. Something we tend to forget, if a place is 6 miles away then if the road joining them is 60 MPH limits then its 10 minutes by car but a good 90 minutes to 2 hours walking. Because you can set the departure & arrival points it is a bit more accurate then just calculating the distance between the two places. Multimap also has the option to view OS maps this function I use quite often when trying to decipher farm names or the obscure local names for areas that are outside the village or town where the Census is centred. Also the OS maps will show the dis-used railways etc. The OS maps also show the contours so you can get an idea of the gradients involved. Somewhere might only be 2 miles down the road but if its up a steep hill it is obviously going to take longer to walk then if its on the flat. Google Earth also has a measuring system built in where you can manually measure distance, and specify the units of measurement, although for anything but a straight line it can be a bit time consuming but then you are not limited to the routes of modern roads. A long time since I've used it though. Regards Kevin (England)