A companion for a walk, not a museum with GPS bolted on.
Compass is published by the Department of the Environment and bundled into the reserve ticket. Here is what it does, and what it deliberately refuses to do.
It follows you, and it never traps you
Stops appear as you reach them. But GPS drifts by tens of metres against these cliffs and dies completely in the tunnels, so every stop also has a button that says you are there, and the full list is always one tap away. The whole walk is completable with location permission refused.
Sixty to ninety seconds a stop
Long enough to be worth stopping for, short enough to put the phone away and keep walking. The best moment in this product is the one where you look up. Everything is written out in full: there is no audio yet, and when there is, the transcript stays.
Free at the gate
The guide is bundled into the reserve ticket. There is nothing further to buy, nothing to subscribe to, and no upgrade withheld behind a wall. A guide you have to pay for twice is a guide nobody uses.
Built for a rock with no signal on it.
Spanish day-trippers are the largest group of visitors here, and they lost EU roaming after Brexit. Cruise passengers often have nothing either. And limestone kills reception inside St Michael's Cave and both tunnel systems, which is precisely where the writing is worth having.
So offline is not a setting on this product. It is the shape of it.
- 1
Scan the sign at the gate
A website opens. There is nothing to install, nothing to log in to, and no email address to hand over.
- 2
Take the walk with you: 1 to 3 MB
Text, illustrations and map data, all of it, in seconds on the reserve's wifi. You do this once, and it starts the moment you tap Start rather than standing between you and the first stop.
- 3
Walk. The phone stops talking to anything
The tour makes no network calls at all for the next three hours. It works in St Michael's Cave and inside both tunnel systems, which is exactly where it matters. A test in the build enforces that; it is not a claim.
What it refuses to do
No accounts, no email capture, no advertising, no dark mode during a walk, no augmented reality and no native app to install. Nothing on any visitor screen asks for anything before it has given something, and location is requested at the second stop, in response to a tap, with the reason attached.