Habitat & heritage mapping · in testing

Every designation.
One map.

Merestone puts the UK's environmental designations on one fast, native map — SSSIs, ancient woodland, priority habitats, listed heritage and 90+ more layers, streamed live from official open data. Built for ecologists, land professionals and everyone who works outdoors.

Coming to the App Store · iPhone, iPad, Mac & Apple Watch One purchase covers every device you own
Merestone on the Mac in dark mode — an Ancient Woodland record open in the side panel over a satellite map of the New Forest

What makes it different

The official data, without the fifteen browser tabs.

A designation check normally means a slow web GIS on a laptop, or squinting at a government portal in a field with one bar of signal. Merestone is the same authoritative data on a map that opens instantly and works offline.

90+ official layers

Designations, habitats, heritage, landscape and access data from Natural England, Historic England, NatureScot and Natural Resources Wales — streamed straight from the source, never a stale export.

Tap anything for its record

Every shape opens its official record — designation details, condition, areas and links. Where features stack on top of each other, a what's-here list untangles them.

An instant desk study

Search around here scans every layer within a radius of any point, with distances and bearings. Or search by site name across England, Scotland and Wales, by place, or by OS grid reference.

The whole country, offline

Download single layers or absolutely everything — about 2.7about 2.4 GBnbsp;GB. Downloaded layers draw automatically the moment you lose signal, so surveys keep working in the middle of nowhere.

Made for the field

One-handed controls by your thumb, one-tap grid-reference copy, saved layer presets, and favourites in folders with CSV export — ready to paste into a report.

Licensed properly

Built on the Open Government Licence with attribution where it belongs. Merestone is an independent app — not affiliated with Defra, Natural England or the MAGIC service.

In the field

Pocket-sized designations.

The full app on your iPhone — one-handed controls by your thumb, offline layers when the signal drops, and the grid reference always one tap from your clipboard.

Merestone on iPhone — satellite map of the New Forest with SSSI boundaries, grid reference chip and one-handed controls
The map, one-handed. Location, zoom and refresh sit by your thumb.
Merestone on iPhone — the official record for an Ancient Woodland, with sharing and copy actions
Tap anything. The official record, with copy and share built in.
Merestone on iPhone — the Map layers sheet with one-tap presets like Desk study and Woodland
One-tap presets. Desk study, woodland — or save your own.

On the desk

The desk-study machine.

Apple-Maps-style floating panels on the Mac: layers, legend, offline downloads and full records beside the map, resizable and draggable to either edge.

The Map layers panel on the Mac — presets, search, and designation layers with live feature counts and toggles
90+ layers, one panel — with live feature counts.
Offline maps on the Mac — download single layers with sizes shown, or everything at once
The whole country, offline — per layer or all of it.

One purchase, four devices

Plan on the iPad, check it on the Mac, carry it on the iPhone, glance at your wrist.

iPhone & iPad

The full app, arranged for one hand on iPhone — location, zoom and refresh sit by your thumb — and desk-study scale on the iPad's big canvas. Everything works offline. Nine app-icon colours, if you like that sort of thing — including Pride.

Mac

A real Mac app with a real menu bar — keyboard shortcuts for search, layers and zoom, Apple-Maps-style floating panels you can move and resize, and a trackpad zoom mode. The desk-study machine.

Apple Watch

Open it in a site and your wrist shows the habitat you're standing in — or the nearest designations around you, with distances and grid references. No phone out of the pocket.

The data

Contains public sector information licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0. © Natural England, © Historic England, © NatureScot, © Natural Resources Wales. Base map © Apple. Requests go straight from your device to the official services.

The promise

Pay once. It's your map.

No account, no subscription, no tracking. The data streams from official government services straight to your device, your favourites and downloads stay on it, and once you've bought Merestone it's yours on iPhone, iPad, Mac and Apple Watch.