Heh, Google is catching up. I want to highly recommend https://www.komoot.de/plan for hike or bike planning. It's fundamentally based on OSM and very very nice.
Google simply doesn't have the data in the UK, it has probably a tenth of the footpath and cyclepath routes compared to OSM, let alone all the information about surfaces, unofficial paths etc.
Share the recommendation for komoot, although it's quite new, and a bit buggy.
OSMAnd is also useful, not so polished, but you get a lot of power over the way you use the map, for instance searching for attractions, pubs, cycle parking, etc along the way, and it's completely offline.
Sometimes I've heard people bitch about the US-centricness of the Internet and how it can be difficult to enter structured data (like phone numbers or addresses) in a format that isn't compatible with US standards.
It's interesting to see that problem from the other direction. That site is useless for me because it can't easily decode US addresses.
http://transportdirect.info has had gradient profiles in its cycle planner for years. I should know, I was involved in writing it (the gradient profiler). The gradients come from official OS data. It is somewhat slower than Google to calculate routes, but for my money has slightly clearer instructions and seems to make better use of cycle paths.
Share the recommendation for komoot, although it's quite new, and a bit buggy.
OSMAnd is also useful, not so polished, but you get a lot of power over the way you use the map, for instance searching for attractions, pubs, cycle parking, etc along the way, and it's completely offline.