Bramble › Pricing › Building your own map

Building your own map

What it actually involves, how long each part takes, and what we do and do not do for you. Written for the self-managed subscription, where you write the stories yourself.

The short version. A list of eight to fifteen places on your grounds, and a paragraph and a photograph for each. Putting them on the map is the quick part and can be done without leaving your desk. The writing is the work, and it is the part only you can do, because the stories are yours.

Before you start

A computer, a phone, or both. That is the whole equipment list. You can place every stop at a desk by clicking your own grounds on the map. Going out with a phone is an option rather than a requirement, and it is worth it for the stops a map cannot show you.
A list of places. Eight to fifteen is a good first map. Fewer than six feels thin on the ground; more than twenty is a lot of writing to face at once, and you can always add more later.
A paragraph for each. Three or four sentences is plenty. What it is, why it is there, and the thing a visitor would never guess.
A photograph for each. One taken on a phone while standing there is fine, and often better than an archive shot, because it looks like what the guest is looking at.
Audio, only if you want it. Optional, and most first maps do without.

You do not need a plan of the estate, a designer, or anything from your website. If you have an illustrated map of the grounds already, we can put your stops on top of it, but that is a later step and not a reason to delay the first one.

The steps, in order

What follows is the shape of the job rather than a click-by-click. The detailed walkthrough, with the actual buttons, lives in the portal alongside the thing you are doing, which is where it is useful. Start at portal.bramblemaps.com/start: thirty days free, no card, about a minute.

Tell the map where your property is

2 minutes

One point, set once, in Settings. It is what the map centres on, and it is what lets the map behave sensibly for someone looking at it from home rather than standing in your car park.

Put the places on the map

an hour or two

Two routes, and you can mix them freely. At a desk, you look at your own grounds from above and click each place; the stop lands where you clicked. Or the portal gives you a link that opens on a phone, and you walk to a place and tap to add it, which records exactly where you are standing.

The desk route is quicker and does most estates perfectly well, because you can see your own grounds and you know what you are looking at. The walking route earns its keep on the stops a photograph from above cannot identify: one particular tree in an avenue of forty, the spot where the ice house used to be, a bench whose view only works from the bench.

On either route, place the pin yourself rather than searching for a postcode. A UK postcode resolves to the centre of an area rather than to your gate, and we have watched a whole terrace land on one pin that way.

Write the stories

the real work

Everything you have placed sits in the portal waiting for you. Open each one, write the story, check the photograph, and publish it. Nothing is visible to guests until you publish it, so you can place all the stops in one sitting and write them over a fortnight without anything half-finished being live.

Write them one at a time, in whatever order suits. A stop with a good paragraph is worth three with a line each.

Make it look like you

20 minutes

Your colours, your fonts, and a splash image so the map opens with your name and your photograph rather than ours. On the self-managed subscription the map carries no Bramble crest and no mention of us.

Walk it once as a guest

as long as the walk takes

Use Preview, then go outside and do it. Do not skip this one. It is the step that finds the real problems: a stop that is behind a locked gate, a story that reads oddly when you are standing in front of the thing, a pin that looked right from above and is twenty metres into a hedge.

Put the scan code where guests are

a minute, then however long a sign takes

In Settings, open Scan code & sharing options and download your map's scan code. It comes as an image file, and where it goes is up to you: a sign at reception, a board in the car park, the gate, a card on each table in the tea room. Guests point a phone at it and the map opens in their browser, with nothing to install.

Making the sign is your job rather than ours. A code printed on office paper and sleeved in a plastic wallet will work, and it will also look like it. One properly made sign at the entrance, with printed cards elsewhere, is what we would suggest.

How long does the whole thing take?

No estate has done this yet, so we are not going to quote you a number as though one had.

Our expectation for a garden or an estate with ten to fifteen stops is an evening to place the stops and two or three more to write them, spread over a week or two rather than done at once. Add an afternoon if you decide to walk the grounds and pin them out there, and another for the guest walk in step 5, which is the one we would not skip. That is an expectation rather than a measurement. The moment someone has actually built one we will replace this paragraph with what it really took, including if the answer is longer than we thought. If you are that first estate, tell us how long it took you.

What we do, and what we do not

We do

Keep your map hosted, online and working
Answer questions by email, usually within two working days
Fix anything that is not working as described
Help you get the scan code and the embed right

We do not

Write your stories
Take or edit your photographs
Visit the site or train your staff
Build the map for you

All four of those are things we are glad to do, and they are what the done-for-you service is. They are not part of the self-managed subscription, and we would rather say so here than have you find out by asking.

No sample content. We never put any in. Your map starts genuinely empty, and everything on it is something you put there. It is easy to hand someone a map seeded with plausible-looking examples so it does not feel bare, and it is a bad idea: it makes a half-built map look finished. If your map looks empty, it is because it is.

If you get stuck

Send us a message. There is a Help link in the portal that does the same thing and tells us which map you are on. We aim to reply within two working days, and usually sooner.

If you would rather not do any of this yourself, that is a reasonable conclusion to reach and it is what the done-for-you service exists for. Tell us and we will quote for it. Trying first is the cheapest way to find out.

Facts on this page last reviewed: September 2026.