Depending on what line thickness you're using, you may get a better result drawing a separate arrowhead polygon and placing it on your line. The automated arrowhead lines can look pretty unappealing, because sometimes the line-end extends beyond the tip of the arrow, as if it's been blunted.

That's a shame, but you could still use it as a hex highlighter for key locations, much as the Ancient Realms and Modern Journeys styles do with circles.

Sometimes getting things to stand out more means just changing the colour or line thickness a little (or font size for text). An outer glow of some kind can help, but it can also make things look too misty, which I think it what's happening with some of the smaller text labels presently. I'm not sure that brown colouring on the labels is working well enough, and even the grey labels could be a little clearer.

The general textures seem fine, although the desert edge is maybe a bit too abrupt (very obvious where the green coloration alongside the river ends currently). That seems to be accentuated by the line of desert-edge dunes north of the river too. The more wavy edge of the dunes south of the river looks more natural to my eye at least.

Scalebars are fine in the Atlas.

You can change the font in any symbols like this in your map by making a new symbol with your preferred font in.

Select the symbol in Symbol Manager (in the Symbols drop-down menu), and Clone it, giving it a new name (this is very important, so you don't overwrite the original symbol).

Then, still in Symbol Manager, select your cloned symbol and click to Edit it. Draw your editing pane and then make whatever changes you wish - all the usual CC3+ tools are available to work on the symbol.

Once you're happy with the new version, click the cross box in the top right corner of the editing pane to dismiss it, and you'll get a terrifying message like this:

Despite the terror, click "Yes" - it's fine to do so with the cloned image.

Then your revised scalebar will be available to use in that map only.

The main problem Sue is that part over to the west is simply blank, or hidden by a convenient piece of artwork, in all of Pauline Baynes' maps of the area.

There might be the option to add the coastline on the eastern side, as shown on her poster map, although that would be quite a bit of extra work, and would need everything moved west within the current map border. Might be worth considering though, if you felt up to the challenge Helen?