NearestForest

What it is

A free app that shows you the nearest Forestry England forests, closest first, and sends you to the one you pick in Apple Maps, Google Maps or Waze with a single tap. It works with no phone signal. There is no sign-up, no tracking and no advertising.

It is live at forestlocator.enhanceify.co.uk, it covers 904 forests and car parks, and I designed, built and deployed it in a day.

The problem

Forestry England's own website works best when you already know which forest you want. On the road it is harder again. I have often sat somewhere unfamiliar, with little signal, trying to work out which Forestry England site was nearest, and given up.

What I wanted was: open, read, tap, drive.

What it does that a website cannot

• It reaches you at the moment you are deciding where to go, instead of needing you to know a forest by name first.
• It puts the quieter sites in front of you. The well-known forests are easy enough to search for; the smaller ones are hard to find unless you already know they are there.
• It tells you whether you are about to arrive at a locked gate. Most of the car parks shut at dusk, and a wasted 40 minute drive is the thing that actually spoils an afternoon.
• Every forest links back to its own page on the Forestry England site.

The fiddly bits

None of it is hard in an interesting way, but all of it had to be right:

• Two sources that disagree. The forest details come from Forestry England's website and the car park locations from the open data they publish. Different shapes, and they do not agree on what counts as a site, so I normalise them into one record.
• The coordinates are published on a different grid to the one phones use. I convert them, then check that every single point lands inside England, because a bad conversion quietly puts a forest in the North Sea.
• There are two postcodes and only one of them is any use. Bedgebury publishes TN17 2SJ for sat nav and TN17 2SL for post. Navigate to the postal one and you arrive at the wrong gate.
• Most sites publish no closing time at all, just "dawn until dusk". So the app works out sunset where that forest actually is, on the day you are looking at it.
• No signal. Forest car parks are exactly where mobile data dies, so the whole dataset ships inside the app and it makes no network calls once it is installed.

What it does not do

No routing (the map app does that far better than I would), no accounts, no tracking, no adverts, and no live closure notices. It is a snapshot of what Forestry England publish, and it tells you the date that snapshot was taken.

One thing I have not properly proven yet: I have only tested the offline side by serving it locally, not in aeroplane mode on the phone. That is the claim the whole design rests on, so it is still an open card on the project board rather than something I have written up as finished.

What is next

The map above shows the obvious gap. Forestry and Land Scotland and Natural Resources Wales are separate organisations publishing separate data, so each is its own piece of work, and a border you cannot see should not stop the app being useful.

Built with

Plain JavaScript, with no framework and no mapping library. A Python pipeline pulls both sources together into the file the app ships with. A small PHP endpoint serves the Siri Shortcut. Deploying is a git pull with a smoke test that checks the app still returns the right nearest forest before it calls the deploy good.