Save Our Fields is a community campaign to protect a historic meadow in Abbots Langley from development.

This field has been open meadow for over a thousand years. It's home to wildlife, a lung for the village, and a living link to the landscape that monks, farmers and one famously fly-slain Pope once walked.

This walk is run by SaveOurFields.com, in association with The Abbots Langley Association.

How you can help

We can't promise the diggers won't win — but the field deserves to be seen and loved while it's here, and that part is up to us.

No accounts, no email, no fuss.

We collect no names, no emails, and no precise locations. Your walk is yours. The meadow keeps no record of you beyond what you choose to share.

GPS is used only to detect when you arrive at waypoints during the walk. Your exact position is never recorded or transmitted. When you reach a stop, we send a deliberately coarse position — rounded to roughly a kilometre — with an anonymous analytics event, so the field team can see, as a rough heatmap, where people tend to walk. Nothing finer than that is ever collected, and it's never tied to a name.

Camera is used only during AR sightings to show you the creatures. The camera feed is never recorded, stored, or sent anywhere. Photos you save never leave this device — they live in your phone's browser only, and there's a burn-the-photos button in the field journal.

"Poof! Gone — and between you and me, we've no time to look at our own photos, let alone anyone else's. The field unit's one camera is pointed at the badgers, not your camera roll. Your snaps stay on your phone — we'd never have it any other way.

P.S. — and if you ever delete your account or clear your photos, don't write to us asking for them back. We can't. They're gone. Seriously."

Field Ranger name (optional) — if you claim a name at the feast, we store a scrambled, unreversible hash of your secret word, not the word itself, and a public display name you chose. That's what powers the Roll of Honour and lets your badges follow you across devices. Forget me wipes it from the ledger at any time.

Analytics events (like "quest started" or "creature sighted") are sent anonymously to help us improve the walk. They contain no personal information. On the campaign website, our contact form runs its own meadow-made robot check — no Google scripts anywhere.

Everything else stays on your device in your browser's local storage. Clearing your browser data clears it.

"No accounts, no email, no tracking — and I mean it. I know what a 'free' app costs; I used to work for them. Your data's not going anywhere it isn't wanted here. You give me a name and a password, and all I keep is a scrambled whisper of it — ask me to forget you and I'll forget you. That's a promise, not a feature."

Map

Base map styled for Save Our Fields (a storybook parchment take on the village) and bundled into the app so it works offline. Map data © OpenStreetMap contributors (ODbL). Rendered with Leaflet.

Weather

The field unit's weather gauge is fed by Open-Meteo (CC BY 4.0) — a free, open weather API with no keys and no trackers, accurate enough to tell you whether to bring a coat. The meadow's coordinates are used, never yours.

AI art pipeline

Character, prop, scenery and badge artwork generated in-house with FLUX.1-dev (Black Forest Labs) via ComfyUI on our own GPU hardware, cut out with BiRefNet (Apache-2.0), and assembled with in-house Python tooling. Prompt-driven, non-commercial.

Photos

All field photographs by Chris Hurley.

Fonts

Zilla Slab (display) by Mozilla. Nunito (body) by Vernon Adams. Permanent Marker (Rusty's notes) by Font Diner. Jim Nightshade (handwritten) by Astigmatic. DSEG7 (digital clock) by Keshikan. Black Ops One (field-unit stencil) by James Grieshaber.

Illustrations

All other SVG artwork and scene illustrations created for this project.

Icons

PWA icons designed for Save Our Fields.

Libraries

Leaflet for the map, and D3-free, dependency-light vanilla JavaScript throughout — see the full list in the repository.

Wildlife Field Guide

Species facts and photos in the Field Guide are drawn from open data — taxonomy and descriptions from Wikidata (CC0), UK occurrence from the NBN Atlas and GBIF (CC-BY), conservation status from the UK Biodiversity Action Plan (OGL), and photographs from Wikimedia Commons (CC0 / CC-BY). Per-species credits:

Made by

Developed with ♥ by Vivid Atom

Power

The farm that runs this walk does it on 9 kW of rooftop solar, banked in a Tesla Powerwall 3 — and when the sun's away, Octopus Energy keeps the lights on. Rusty's verdict: "I've stood here a thousand years and never needed a plug socket myself — but a company with eight arms on the cables clearly doesn't want the lights going out. Eight arms, and every one of them knows its job. I've only got the two, and I haven't dropped a thing since 1066. I like their thinking."

Suppliers

The quiet machinery behind this walk is looked after by people who've been doing it a long time and haven't dropped anything yet — OVH in the engine room, BunnyCDN on the gate, Ionos pointing the way, Let's Encrypt on the locks, BetterStack keeping watch, and rsync.net holding a spare copy of the ledger safe in the hills. Rusty's verdict: "I've seen a hundred schemes come and go in my time. These ones don't fall over."

"They tell me this whole walk was built over a few crazy days with OpenCode and DeepSeek Flash v4 doing the typing. I've no idea what that means — but if there's a glitch, blame them. If it's lovely, that's me."

"P.S. They moved my drawing engine to an air-conditioned office in the shire. My batteries stopped weeping."

Ride the field

The meadow itself is for feet — the wildflowers and the badgers never signed up for tyre tracks. But the old ways around her, a thousand years older than any of us, were made for wheels.

• Footpaths — for boots only (green arrows; stiles and kissing gates a bike won't squeeze through).
• Bridleways — open to bikes and horses (blue arrows).
• Byways (BOAT) — open to all traffic, bikes welcome.
• Cycle routes & shared paths — signed, often quiet lanes or shared use.

The honest bit: which path is which can change gate to gate. When the signposts aren't talking, check the signpost — or walk the bike a minute. Nobody minds.

Ride to the field

Come by the quiet lanes rather than the busy roads — the field's worth the pretty way round. Lock up at St Lawrence Church or the marked entrances, and always through the frame and both wheels.

The 10-minute M-check

Before every ride, a quick once-over in the shape of the letter M:

• Air — tyres firm to the thumb; pump if they give.
• Brakes — levers stop the wheel; pads not worn to the metal.
• Chain — clean, oiled, not rusty or slack.
• Quick-release / bolts — wheels and seatpost snug, nothing loose.
• Bolts — bars, saddle and cranks all tight.
• Gears — shifts cleanly through every sprocket.

Workshop fixes

When the bike needs more than a squeeze — the jobs worth learning:

• Brake adjustment — centre the calipers, toe the pads in, take up cable stretch.
• Gear indexing — barrel adjuster for fine shifts; limit screws keep the chain on.
• Chain wear — a 12-link ruler check: ~1/16" of stretch means a new chain before it eats the gears.
• Cables — frayed or sticky means replace; a fresh cable feels like a new bike.
• Play — rock the headset and cranks; a wobble means a service, not a fiddle.

Roadside fixes

• Puncture — levers, tube, pump (or a patch). Find the cause before you refit, or you'll be back on your knees in a mile.
• Dropped chain — ease it back on with the front mech or a gentle back-pedal, then get home in the big ring.
• What to carry — pump, spare tube or patches, tyre levers, a multi-tool, and a phone that's charged.

Lock it up

• A Sold Secure-rated lock — through the frame, the rear wheel and whatever you're locking to.
• Register it free with BikeRegister — a stolen bike that's marked is a stolen bike that's findable.

Meadow manners on wheels

• Footpaths for feet, bridleways and byways for wheels.
• Give way to walkers and horses — slow right down and call a friendly hello.
• Shut the gates behind you; leave the field exactly as you found it.
• No skids on the grass — keep to the hard stuff.

Ride prepared

• Lights and something bright after dark — the meadow gets proper dark.
• Carry the kit, and keep your phone charged for the way home.

Came off the bike? If it's serious, call 999 (or 112) — and check yourself over before you ride on. Keep your phone charged for the way home.

Cyclists for the fields

The data centre and the new homes mean more lorries on the lanes and more traffic on the quiet ways you ride. The Local Plan consultation decides where the line is drawn — and a cyclist's objection counts every bit as much as anyone's.

Have your say on the Local Plan →