Context : In the project Galactic Cold Cores we are carrying out Herschel photometric observations of cold regions of the interstellar clouds as previously identified with the Planck satellite .
The aim of the project is to derive the physical properties of the population of cold clumps and to study its connection to ongoing and future star formation .

Aims : We examine the cloud structure around the Planck detections in 71 fields observed with the Herschel SPIRE instrument by the summer of 2011 .
We wish to determine the general physical characteristics of the fields and to examine the morphology of the clouds where the cold high column density clumps are found .

Methods : Using the Herschel SPIRE data , we derive colour temperature and column density maps of the fields .
Together with ancillary data , we examine the infrared spectral energy distributions of the main clumps .
The clouds are categorised according to their large scale morphology .
With the help of recently released WISE satellite data , we look for signs of enhanced mid-infrared scattering ( ‘ coreshine ’ ) , an indication of growth of the dust grains , and have a first look at the star formation activity associated with the cold clumps .

Results : The mapped clouds have distances ranging from \sim 100 pc to several kiloparsecs and cover a range of sizes and masses from cores of less than 10 M _ { \sun } to clouds with masses in excess of 10000 M _ { \sun } .
Most fields contain some filamentary structures and in about half of the cases a filament or a few filaments dominate the morphology .
In one case out of ten , the clouds show a cometary shape or have sharp boundaries indicative of compression by an external force .
The width of the filaments is typically \sim 0.2–0.3 pc .
However , there is significant variation from 0.1 pc to 1 pc and the estimates are sensitive to the methods used and the very definition of a filament .
Enhanced mid-infrared scattering , coreshine , was detected in four clouds with six additional tentative detections .
The cloud LDN 183 is included in our sample and remains the best example of this phenomenon .
About half of the fields are associated with active star formation as indicated by the presence of mid-infrared point sources .
The mid-infrared sources often coincide with structures whose sub-millimetre spectra are still dominated by the cold dust .

Conclusions :