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Changelog

Every improvement, out in the open.

The guide is updated most weeks — new walks, fuller write-ups, sourced data and quiet fixes under the hood. Here’s the running record.

Show: 223 updates
MEDIUM

Under the bonnet: an outside security audit, answered

An outside audit of the site came back with five findings and four are answered in this build: the Strava cards on fell pages are built from data rather than pasted in as HTML; withdrawing consent for Instagram now cancels any embed still waiting to load, and the choice expires after 180 days as the policy says; the privacy page describes what the site actually stores, the newsletter included; and there is a security.txt so anyone who finds a problem knows where to write. The fifth, a content security policy, goes out in report-only mode first. Four new checks run on every push so none of it can quietly come back. Privacy & cookies →
MAJOR

The maps page becomes the map: one plate, every dataset a layer

The maps page used to be eight text cards and not one picture of a map. It is now one plate, the relief and the park outline the site already draws, with what we have measured laid over it as layers you can switch: 597 tops with the 214 Wainwrights ringed, 576 of the 757 bus stops on our services, 977 car parks, the 185 walks drawn from their GPX, and the perfect Wainwright round as one dashed line. The legend is the old list, each entry now a switch with the count it stands for and a link to that map's own page. Two entries stay words rather than layers, and say why: access land, because we hold no boundary we could source, and the Howgills, because they sit east of the plate, which is the point of that piece. The maps →
MAJOR

Walked, walked in part, or planned: a route now says which, from the evidence

Twenty routes carried Lee's walked date and Strava tracks covering most of their line, and still said "not personally walked", because that banner read the route's publishing status rather than the walk. It now reads the evidence. A route with a walked date says so beside Download GPX; where the tracks cover only part of the drawn line it says "walked in part" and names the kilometres that come from the map, on the page, the card and the callout; and only a route with no walked date at all is called planned. Nothing changed hands: no date was added, no status moved. The About page's boggy-path sentence now scopes itself to walked routes. A route walked in part →
MEDIUM

Eight small honesty fixes from an outside audit

The summer page's summary line under the heatstroke advice read as permission to wait half an hour; it now says heatstroke has no line. The homepage tile called the Mountain Rescue hazard notes "live"; they are compiled from team reports and now say so. The route count read 104, 106 and 183 on three pages against 183 in the store; one number now feeds all three. The data-sources page no longer promises that FAQ markup shows answers in search, since Google withdrew that in May. The press hook no longer infers the descent from the clock. Red Screes lost its last 776. The planner says which walks are checked against today's conditions. And the schema breadcrumb on every place page now agrees with the visible one. Data sources →
MEDIUM

The 214 Wainwrights in the fewest walks

How many separate walks does it take to climb every Wainwright? Thirty-nine, on days capped at 25 km and 1,500 m of ascent, solved from the fell data with every start pinned to a real access point. The page shows what a gentler cap costs, which is not more walks but fewer fells: at 10 km and 600 m days, 98 summits cannot be reached at all. It ships the findings and the cost curve, not the plans: nobody has walked these lines, so there are no walk cards and no GPX, and it says plainly that a solved set is a proof that a number is achievable, not a recommendation. The fewest walks →
MINOR

How to cite and embed, on one page

Everything a club webmaster or a journalist needs to link to hikes.guide or reuse a chart was already on the site, scattered across the data page and thirteen report charts. It is now one page: the licence in a sentence, a paste-ready credit, four forty-word blurbs with the one link each would carry, and the embed code for every chart, which load nothing but the chart. Linked from the footer, the data page and the press page. How to cite →
MEDIUM

Place pages get the fell pages' jump bar and a strip of today

Every place guide now opens the way a fell page does: a bar of six short labels that follows you down the page, with the rest under More. Below it, where the data exists, a strip of four cells for today: the highest fell within five kilometres and its verdict, the first sunlight at the nearest route start this month, the water (swim rule, depth, and any algae report inside sixty days), and the last verified bus from the nearest stop, per direction. Thirlmere was the test page; seventy-three pages carry the bar and sixty-seven the strip. Where fewer than two cells have anything to say, the strip is not shown. Thirlmere →
MAJOR

The season ahead: six weeks and six months of leans, from fifty seasonal runs

Between the fifteen-day plumes and the regional outlook, the weather page now shows what ECMWF's seasonal runs lean towards for six areas of the district: each week for six weeks, then each month for six months, for temperature, rain, wind and, when any run has it on the horizon, snow. Every cell says how many of the fifty runs agree, in words (nearly all, most, split, few, hardly any), and a ground row names the six boggiest fells in each area, because a wet lean matters most where the ground already holds water. Refreshed nightly from open data; weeks older than three days and months older than forty are hidden rather than shown stale. The weather page →
MEDIUM

A second opinion on snow, from the Met Office

Our snow-line reading comes from the freezing level in the open forecast models. Each morning the 214 Wainwright summits are now also read from the Met Office's site-specific forecast, and where the two disagree the fell's card says so: a likely snow call the Met Office does not share becomes possible, and snow the Met Office sees where we saw none is raised to possible rather than ignored. The Met Office reading is printed beside ours wherever it applies, with the attribution their terms ask for, and it is read once a day so the free allowance is never spent twice. Conditions →
MINOR

Parking out of beta, and a dozen small things a reader notices

The parking map is out of beta and in the menu as Parking. Titles and descriptions no longer end on a hanging word, guarded so they cannot again. Addresses typed without .html now redirect instead of failing. The maps and press pages are in the sitemap. Emoji in headings are hidden from screen readers. Five route photographs that were loaded from Wikimedia on every visit are now hosted here, with their credits kept on the route page. The homepage's month-pick chip reads the route's own difficulty band instead of a stale word. And the planner's meta lines are off monospace. Parking →
MINOR

Seven new place guides: three passes, four valleys, and Buttermere made whole

Hardknott, Wrynose and Kirkstone get access pages on the Honister pattern, with the roads measured along the mapped line on the terrain model rather than quoted from a sign: one in five over the steepest 200 m on Hardknott and Wrynose, one in seven on the A592, one in five on The Struggle. Great Langdale, Wasdale, Eskdale and the Duddon get valley guides: how to get there and park, where to stay, what to see, the walks. And Buttermere is one page now, the valley, the village and the lake walk together. Every page names its sources and none claims a bus time it has not earned.
MEDIUM

Every place we cover, on one page, and the planner gets its proper name

The page in the menu called Places was never a list of places. It is the long read on planning a trip: how the Lakes fit together, where to base yourself, how long you need, what it costs. So it is now called Plan a trip, and the list it was mistaken for exists: sixty-one place guides on one page at /places/, by type, from the towns and villages through the valleys, lakes and tarns to the waterfalls, each with its picture, one line, and how many of our walks start there. The two pages point at each other, and the breadcrumb on every place page now leads to the list.
MEDIUM

Three more buses: the Ullswater Hopper, the 6 from Barrow, and one ticket from the train to Keswick

The Ullswater Hopper, the community bus SITU runs around the northern half of the lake with Stagecoach, now counts on every fell and route page it reaches: twelve Martindale fells that were one for the car, Hallin Fell, Loadpot Hill and Wether Hill among them, now have a bus at the Martindale cattle grid at weekends until the start of November. The 6 from Barrow through Ulverston and Newby Bridge to Windermere is on the site too, which puts Gummer's How on a bus for the Furness side. And the X4 and X5 entry now says the thing worth knowing: one train ticket to Keswick Bus includes the ride from Penrith. Forty-six car parks gained the bus that stops beside them.
MAJOR

How sure is the forecast? The weather page now shows fifty runs, not one

Every forecast you read is one run of a weather model. The weather page now shows fifty: ECMWF's ensemble, the same model run fifty times from slightly different starts, reduced to six areas of the district and fifteen days ahead. For each area there is a band showing where the runs sit, the middle run as a line, GEFS's second opinion dashed over it, and under every day a count of how many of the fifty stayed dry. Where they agree you can plan on it; where they split the page says so instead of pretending. The window finder now says whether the runs agree with the window it picked. It refreshes after each morning and evening run, from open data only.
MEDIUM

The Maps and guidebooks section is gone, and with it every affiliate link

Every fell, route and place page ended with a card of maps and guidebooks whose Buy on Amazon links paid the site a commission if you bought. They paid nothing worth having, so the card has gone from all of them, the five tracked book links on the collections page are plain titles now, and the disclosure that went with them has come off the about and data-sources pages. There is now no commercial link of any kind on hikes.guide: nothing earns a commission, and no recommendation is paid for. A check in the build keeps it that way.
MINOR

Field notes on ten more fells, and the fell page loses its small labels

Sergeant Man, Harrison Stickle, Kentmere Pike, Hindscarth, Clough Head, Thunacar Knott, Ullscarf, Froswick, Birkhouse Moor and Brandreth now carry my own notes from the day I walked them, which makes ninety fells with a note of that kind. On every fell page the small capitals that sat above a block - Key information, Getting there, and the rest - are gone; the block's heading says it instead. The valley pages for Borrowdale, Honister Pass, Kentmere and Little Langdale have been read and checked, and Little Langdale now links the Slater Bridge and Cathedral Cave walk it said it did not have.
MEDIUM

The coloured stripes are gone from every card

For a year every box on the site that wanted attention grew a thick coloured bar down its left edge: warnings, verdicts, the best day of the week, a quote, a note, a plain card. A hundred and twelve of them, and by the time a hazard card and a photograph tip wore the same stripe it meant nothing. They are all gone. A card that carries a warning or a verdict now says so with its surface: the tint the site already uses for good, marginal and poor days, a thin border in the same hue, and the heading or the verdict in that colour. Plain cards are plain. A guard in the build keeps the stripe from coming back.
MAJOR

Every fell page in the order of a walker's day

A fell page used to answer its questions in the wrong order: the view before the parking, the beds before the buses, and safety as a small heading the contents list never named. All 598 pages now run the way a day runs: is it worth going, what the fell is, the routes up, where to park and which bus, what can hurt you, how to get off in cloud, the map, the ground underfoot, the view, somewhere to sleep, the questions people ask, the fells next door. The contents bar shows the five sections walkers reach for, a Parking button sits beside the routes one, and a small fell with no route guide or hazard card says so in one honest line.
MAJOR

Walked or not is one switch, and the routes map draws only what you are looking at

Whether I have walked a route is the thing this site is for, and it was one chip in a row of nine. It is now a two-way switch above the search: all routes, or the 85 I have walked, with the count read from the walk dates. The map has changed too. With nothing selected it shows one pin per start; choose a filter and it draws only the matching walks and fits them to the screen, instead of 183 lines on top of each other. Hover a walk card and its line thickens; hover a line and its card lights up.
MEDIUM

Thirteen walks get a picture at the top, and four legs their photographs

The Newlands round, the Grasmoor round, Swarth Fell and Loadpot Hill, Raven Crag at first light, Kentmere's neighbour Sallows and eight more now open on a photograph of the walk rather than a green panel. Each was taken on that route on the day it was walked, placed by matching where the camera was against the line on the map. Four legs that had no picture gained one the same way. Where nothing was taken on a route, it stays as it was: a walk I have done without a camera is still a walk I have done.
MEDIUM

West of Wet Sleddale written up leg by leg, and Ullscarf told where to bail

The Shap Fells round west of Wet Sleddale - Seat Robert, High Wether Howe, Selside Pike and seven more tops - now carries the full human layer on all ten legs: the ground, the waypoints, where the moor loses people, and the way off. One compass word was corrected against the track before it went live: leaving Selside Pike for Hare Shaw you head north-north-east, not east. The Ullscarf, Eagle Crag and Sergeant's Crag round gains its bail points on every leg, including the one that matters: if the rock on the Eagle Crag descent is wet, refuse it and go back.
MAJOR

The routes hub sorts within its regions, and filters by difficulty, ascent and shape

Since 24 August the routes page had been showing seven region headings above nothing and every walk in one long column: the sort ran on load and pulled each card out of its region. Fixed, and the page gained three filters walkers actually choose by: difficulty (Easy to Moderate, Hard, Severe), ascent in four bands, and loop or linear. When nothing matches, the page now names the chips that are on. The map sits behind a button on a phone, and the hub and the walk planner point at each other.
MEDIUM

The parking map lost a fifth of its weight and learned which walks start where

The 1,013 pins used to ride inside the page as a block of data; they now arrive only when the map is scrolled into view, and the page is 300 KB lighter. Every car park that is the start of one of our routes says so and links to it, a route page links back to the map with its own start marked, and the filters show a live count with the map drawing only what matches. The title no longer promises to know how full a car park gets, because we do not.
MINOR

Book covers, a printable tick-list that prints, and the planner in plain type

The fell-list pages' book cover, stretched to a strip by a stray height, now sits to the right of the introduction, and the paragraph that appeared twice appears once. The Wainwright tick-list prints on two sides without the site's menu and footer. The walk planner's cards put their reason and verdict in ordinary text rather than the small monospace used for metadata. Visiting the Lake District gains a sticky line of section links and opens its first three answers.
MEDIUM

The features library shows its receipts

Every card on the features index now says what is behind it, counted from the page itself at build time: the word count, how many outside sources it cites, how many data tables it carries, and the month it was published. A glossary or a map says so instead of claiming a read time, a printable says it is one, and a long read is marked as one. Two filter chips that returned a single card are folded into real categories, and on a phone the chips sit on one scrolling line so the first card is on screen. Nothing is typed by hand; if an article changes, its line changes with it.
MAJOR

Every direction we give, checked against the track

Every direction-of-travel word in our route guides - every 'bear left', every 'head south-west' - is now tested automatically against the recorded GPX it describes. The check reads each stage's own span of the track and fails if no part of it supports the word, so it runs on every change rather than whenever somebody thinks to look. Building it turned up sixty-six stages across forty-three walks to put right, and eleven bearings on eight more; all were corrected in the source the pages are built from, so a rebuild cannot undo them. Two phrases are exempt, each with a written reason - both describe a move too short for the method to resolve. All walks →
MEDIUM

Thirty-eight walks that are kind on the knees

Steep descent is the part that hurts, and it can be measured: we take the worst drop over any 250 m of each recorded track and list only the walks with no sustained steep ground. Thirty-eight qualify. It is the same measurement behind the dog, buggy and knees panel on every route page, so a walk cannot be gentle in the collection and steep on its own page. Distance is not the filter - some of these are long days out - and the map shows where they are, which matters when the honest answer is 'not that valley'. Kind on the knees →
MEDIUM

Which car parks fill up, from the authority's own figures

Freedom-of-information data on twenty Lake District car parks, public now that the checking is done. Some sell over fourteen times as much parking in August as in January; others barely move across the year, and knowing which kind you are driving to is the difference between a plan and a hope. All twenty are ranked, with a cross-check against a second dataset and a section on what the figures cannot tell you - they count tickets sold, not the cars that arrived and left again. The two kinds of car park →
MAJOR

Winter on the fells: the day is shorter than you think

A full winter guide, and then half as long again on the day it landed - ten claims that had been left marked for checking are now resolved against primary sources rather than repeated from elsewhere. How much daylight each route really has in December, measured against the terrain rather than the almanac; what Mountain Rescue record as contributory factors; and what actually goes wrong, which is mostly not the cold. It says at the top what it will not do: it is not a winter skills course, and it will not tell you the day looks fine. Winter on the fells →
MAJOR

Twenty-three walks gain the detail that only comes from walking them

Twenty-three route guides now carry a proper human layer, leg by leg: what the ground is actually like, the waypoints worth ticking off, where people go wrong, and how to get off if you need to. That is the part no computation produces — the distances and ascents were always measured from the GPX, but a gradient does not tell you the bracken is over your head in August or that the path braids into sheep trods below the summit. Stile End, Whin Rigg, the Ulpha Birketts and twenty more. Where a leg has nothing written against it, it stays blank rather than being filled with something generic. All walks →
MINOR

The features hub reads as one thing

The features hub had two visual languages: eleven drawn cards carrying a title and a figure, and twenty-seven photographs carrying nothing. Every card now shares the same composition. Thirteen carry a figure taken from the article itself; the rest show a title and no number, because a guide with no honest figure should not be given one. Three cards that were social images doing hub duty are now drawn from their page's own data, and a broken card image on the relief map — a stray character that stopped the file rendering at all — is fixed. Features →
MEDIUM

Where a walk says it was reviewed, it now means it

Every fell page used to carry a “last reviewed” date that was really the date the site was rebuilt — all 236 of them showed the same day, whether or not anyone had looked. That claim is withdrawn. Route pages keep a review date but it now comes from the record of the pass itself, so several moved backwards, which is the correction working. Fifty-one walks now carry a “written and walked by Lee” byline rather than eight, and where the record holds only a month it says “July 2026” rather than inventing a day. All walks →
MINOR

The Wainwright count now says what kind of number it is

The About page says 77% of the 214 Wainwrights walked, and until now it did not say where that came from — while several pages described it as Strava-verified, which it is not. It is a hand-kept count: 164 of 214, last set on 1 September. The part that can be shown is Strava, and that gives 154 — 72% — matched to a recorded activity. The gap is fells walked before anything was recorded. Both numbers are now on the page, because showing one and calling it the other was the actual error. About →
MEDIUM

Two more maps: the walks we hold, and the ground itself

Two more maps join the hub. The walks map draws every route we hold — all 185 — from the GPX recorded on the day rather than a line drawn between two summits, coloured by length: 41 easy, 73 moderate, 49 hard and 22 severe. Blank ground means we have not recorded a walk there, not that there is nothing to walk. The relief map shows the shape of the ground itself, hachured from a 30-metre terrain model across the whole National Park, with the seventeen lakes and sixteen settlements marked. Neither is a navigation map — take OS Explorer OL4 to OL7 onto the hill — they are for the planning you do before you leave. The walks map →
MAJOR

A maps hub, and two new maps to open it

There is now one place for every map here, and two new maps to open it with. The bus map answers a question this site had been answering badly: 238 of the 598 fells have a checked bus stop within a kilometre, and 128 more within five, with the walking distance to each given rather than left to guess at. The fells map plots all 544 Lakeland tops by height with the 214 Wainwrights picked out, so it shows which list a summit belongs to and not only where it sits. The hub also gathers the parking and access maps, the Howgills and the perfect round, which until now were scattered. Maps of the Lake District →
MEDIUM

Fourteen more routes tell you what the ground is like

Fourteen more routes carry written directions rather than only a distance and a climb: what each leg is actually like underfoot, the waypoints to tick off, the decision points, the places people get it wrong, and how to get off if the day turns. That takes it to 86 of our 185 routes, up from 72. Among them are Allen Crags and Glaramara, Bannisdale Fell, Dodd and Whiteside, and the Birketts around Devoke Water, Grisedale Pike, Carrock Fell, the Dunnerdale Fells and the Kentmere Horseshoe. None of it is computed — it is written from having walked it.
MINOR

Seven more fells get a note from the summit

Wetherlam, Mardale Ill Bell, Ill Bell, Hart Side, Dale Head, Robinson and Seat Sandal now carry a walker’s note alongside the summary — the things a map cannot tell you. Where the sitting is dry and where it is not. Which side of Ill Bell is kinder on the knees on the way down. Why Seat Sandal is an easy bag for an adult and, on one occasion, a mutiny for two children. That is 80 fells with a note, up from 73.
MAJOR

April, not August

A new piece answering the question everyone asks and nobody has data for: when should you actually come? April averages 16.7 dry days and 16.0 sunny ones. August averages 10.5 and 10.2 — level with February, and only December is poorer. That is eleven years of daily weather records for a point in the central Lakes. Separately, the national park's own parking figures show eleven of twelve car parks at their busiest in August and not one in April. Two sets of numbers, collected by different people for different reasons, pointing the same way. It also makes the case against April, which is real: colder than June, less daylight, and snow on the tops well into the month. April, not August →
MEDIUM

Four walks for every month of the year

The month block on the front page now covers all twelve months rather than eight, so there is a suggestion whatever day you arrive. May to August were the gap, and they were the hardest to choose: in high summer every walk fits the daylight, so the thing that separates one from another is not the light but the crowds. Those four months now lean on the parking figures instead — Threlkeld at 1.5 times its January traffic in June, against Brockhole at more than fourteen. Same four walks a month, chosen for a different reason than the winter ones.
MEDIUM

Twenty more fells answer “is it hard?”

Bakestall, Whiteside, White Side, Grey Friar, Green Gable, Grike, Gray Crag, Middle Fell, Fellbarrow, Brandreth, Long Side, Haycock, Caw Fell, Rosthwaite Fell, Graystones, Watson's Dodd, Great Rigg, Wether Hill, Arthur's Pike and Sergeant's Crag. Each answers in a sentence, then gives our own measured distance, ascent and grade, then the catch — which is rarely the climbing. On Watson's Dodd it is finding the summit at all; on Caw Fell it is how far you are from help; on Middle Fell it is that you must go up and down at the ends of the ridge and never off its sides. Every figure comes from our own route data, so it changes when the route does.
MAJOR

The last bus, and which way it is going

Forty-nine fell pages now say when the last bus leaves the stop nearest the walk — and which town it is heading for. That second half matters more than it sounds. Our figure is the last departure in any direction, so at Cow Bridge in Hartsop the answer is 19:51, which is right if you want Windermere and no use at all if you want Penrith: that one went at 17:45, from the stop across the road. Naming the town lets you see at a glance whether it is your bus. Twelve stops so far, each confirmed against the operator's timetable. Where a time cannot be pointed at a named place, nothing is published.
MEDIUM

Facts we already had, on the page at last

A hundred and twenty-two things we knew about places to stay were not being shown. The rule is that a fact only appears with the sentence from the property's own site that proves it, which is right — but the check for a yes wanted the word on its own, and these answers were written with their detail attached: "yes, shared" for a drying room, "yes, six spaces, plus unrestricted on-street" for parking. All true, all quoted, none of it printed. Parking gains thirty-four, dogs and family rooms twenty-four each. Four are still held back, because they begin with yes and then say the opposite — a tumble dryer is not a drying room, and we would rather say nothing.
MEDIUM

All 214 Wainwrights, on paper

A printable tick-list: every Wainwright in his seven books, highest first within each, with a box to tick and the height in metres. It is laid out for A4 and prints fine in black and white — nothing on it depends on colour — and it is an ordinary page rather than a download, so you print it or save it as a PDF straight from the browser. Built for the rucksack lid and the kitchen wall rather than the screen. The Wainwrights — a tick-list →
MAJOR

Photographs on fifty-six walks, leg by leg

Three routes carried my own photographs yesterday; fifty-six do now, three hundred and forty-seven pictures in all. Each is placed by matching where it was taken against the line on the map, so the picture beside a leg is a picture of that leg. Several turned out to belong to a different walk over the same ground — one was taken twenty kilometres away — and those were moved to the walk they came from rather than published where they did not belong. A long descent can carry several; a short hop between two tops carries one, or none at all. Legs without a photograph read exactly as they did before.
MEDIUM

When the sun reaches the tops — now including December

The panel naming the summits that wait for the sun led with the two equinoxes and then named each top's slowest morning. But slowest means the worst of four dates, so wherever midsummer happened to be worse, the December figure never appeared at all. On thirty-four walks a summit that waits a serious length of time in late December said nothing about it: Castle Crag waits thirty-five minutes on the shortest day, and the page talked about June. Every material midwinter wait is now named, with the time the sun actually clears the skyline. Same modelling, same caveat — this is the skyline, never the weather.
MINOR

Reading the day on the tops at a glance

The band showing how a day looks on the tops was a row of twenty-four pale blocks in three colours so close together that outdoors, on a phone, they were one colour — and a single hour was ten pixels wide, too narrow for anything but colour to live in. It is now eight blocks of three hours, each wide enough to carry an icon: sun, rain, snowflake, cloud or wind, so the shape tells you what the limit is and the colour only tells you how serious. Three forecast models still run behind it, and where they disagree the block is drawn fainter — faint means less agreed, never less serious. A key underneath names all of it.
MAJOR

Which bus reaches this fell, measured rather than guessed

The transport panel used to decide whether a bus served a fell from a list typed against each car park, and on 141 fells it was wrong — telling people to drive when a stop was a walk away. Latrigg said drive; it is 2.6 km and 300 m of climbing from a stop in Keswick. Every fell is now measured along real paths from the nearest stop, and lands in one of three shapes: a short step from the stop, a quantified walk in, or honestly out of reach. Where we cannot measure it — a bus whose stops we don't hold, a valley our path data doesn't join up — the page says so instead of telling you to drive. Last buses, Sundays and winter are still to come.
MEDIUM

Photographs on the walk, stage by stage

Three routes now carry my own photographs against the legs they belong to — the Fusedale Circuit, the Whinlatter Loop, and Lonscale Fell to Bakestall, twenty-six pictures in all. Each one is placed by matching where it was taken to the line on the map, so the picture beside a leg is a picture of that leg. A long descent can carry several; a short hop between two tops carries one, or none. Where there is no photograph the leg simply reads as it did before — an empty frame would say less than nothing.
MEDIUM

Escape routes, on the map as well as the profile

Eleven routes now show their confirmed escape routes as a marker on the route map, not only as a flag on the elevation profile. The flag tells you how far into the walk an escape is; the marker shows you the ground you would be descending, which is the thing you actually want when you are deciding whether to carry on. Each one names where it comes out. Only escapes I have walked or checked appear — the rest stay off the map until they are.
MINOR

Field notes on eight more routes

Thirty routes now carry a stage-by-stage account of the walk rather than distances alone: what the leg is, the waypoints to tick off, the decisions, the places it is easy to go wrong, and the way off. The eight added this week are High Rigg, Great Mell Fell, Stone Arthur, Gowbarrow Fell and Little Mell Fell, Castle Crag and Brund Fell, Hartsop Dodd, the Sour Howes to Troutbeck Tongue round, and Blencathra to Mungrisdale Common.
MEDIUM

When the sun reaches the tops

A hundred route pages now say when the sun actually clears the skyline from each summit on the walk — not sunrise, which is a different thing on a fell with high ground to its east. Both equinoxes are shown because they fall in the walking season, and each summit also names the morning it waits longest. Rounded to the quarter hour and meant as a general idea rather than a schedule. Modelled from a 30 m elevation model against each summit’s own skyline, never observed.
MEDIUM

Places to stay now lives on the town pages

Keswick, Ambleside and Grasmere now carry the full list of places to stay near them — every eligible property, with a full card where we have quoted a drying room, dogs, family rooms or parking, and a name-and-link line where we have not. Route and fell pages that used to repeat those lists now show a single line naming the trailhead and the town, and link across. The same hotel was being printed on as many as 58 pages; the walk itself gets the room back.
MEDIUM

Route pages: the shape of the walk, not just its numbers

Every route page now draws its own elevation ridgeline in the hero, and the profile below the map is shaded by steepness — using the same four bands as the route’s steepness rating, so the chart is the evidence for the grade rather than a second opinion. Summits are numbered once, and those numbers run through the ridgeline, the profile, the stage notes, the pacing table and the summits list. The stage notes that change what you do on the hill — what is easy to get wrong, and how to get off — now stand apart from the ones that don’t. And the “Places to stay” recommendations no longer stop mid-sentence behind a “More on why” toggle.
MINOR

Two more bus services, 134 bus-to-car-park links, and wider text on place pages

The 509 and the 517 now appear on fell and route pages. The 517 is the Little Langdale Shuttle the National Park names without a number, and it is the only bus that reaches Little Langdale, so Lingmoor Fell, Wetherlam from the east, Holme Fell and Black Fell all gain a car-free option. The 509 runs the Ullswater side of the Penrith to Keswick corridor, calling at Pooley Bridge, Glenridding, Patterdale, Hartsop and Dockray, so there are now two options where the site showed only the 508. Neither entry states a frequency, because we have not verified a timetable and inventing one for a bus somebody plans a day around is not something we will do; both send you to the operator instead. Separately, 134 more car parks now say which buses stop at them, taking the total to 314. The threshold for attaching a bus to a car park moved from 50 to 150 metres, which is roughly a two-minute walk. Place pages now run their text at the full width of the card, as the feature pages do, with more space between the lines to suit the longer measure. And the events section on those pages has its panel back.
MAJOR

Car-free Borrowdale and Buttermere, and 75 name claims removed from fell pages

Twenty route pages around Borrowdale, Buttermere, Whinlatter and the Coledale fells now say whether the walk fits the bus: which service, when it reaches the start, when the last one leaves, and the time to be off the last summit to make it. That turnaround is deliberately 30 minutes earlier than the arithmetic allows. The 77, 77A and 78 run daily including public holidays, not just weekends like the Wasdale bus, so a car-free day in Borrowdale is a Tuesday in October. Two of the twenty finish in Keswick, so they say the better thing: there is a bus out and no last bus to miss. Times are from the operator's summer 2026 timetable, read on 21 August. Fell pages also carried 85 claims that a fell is 'also known as' something else, and 75 were wrong — Great Crag is not also called Stonethwaite; Stonethwaite is the hamlet telling you which Great Crag. Ten genuine ones remain. And the Coniston page has lost its one commercial link, so it ends on the FAQ rather than a place to buy a map.
MAJOR

Places to stay, on the route and fell pages for four valleys

Route and fell pages around Keswick, Ambleside, Grasmere and Wasdale now carry a “Places to stay” panel — 74 route pages and 172 fell pages, from 66 properties. On a fell page they are grouped by which start you would walk from. Everything each place offers is quoted from its own website — drying room, dogs, family rooms, packed lunch, step-free access. If we could not find a business saying it in its own words, we do not print it. No prices, no booking, no affiliate links, every link nofollow, and we have not stayed at any of them. Distances are straight lines, never walking times. Where a place states it does not take children we say so, because finding out at the door is worse. This is four valleys, not the whole Lake District: 257 of 779 collected entries have been checked against the page they were quoted from, and the rest stay hidden until they have been. Town and village pages do not carry the panel yet.
MEDIUM

Correction: Wasdale does have a bus, and we said it did not

We told readers that Wasdale had no public transport at all, and that the fells above it were one for the car. That was wrong. The Wasdale Explorer runs from Ravenglass to Wasdale Head on Saturdays, Sundays and bank holiday Mondays through the summer — 2 May to 31 August this year — for £3 all day, with children free and well behaved dogs allowed. Sixteen fell pages carried the wrong advice, Scafell Pike among them. The first bus reaches Wasdale Head at 09:00 and the last one back leaves at 19:00, and both run the whole season, so a full day on the fell works without a car from the start of May. It begins at Ravenglass on the Cumbrian Coast line, so the journey can be done by train and bus throughout. Every affected page now names the service and links its timetable.
MEDIUM

The routes page stopped downloading 41 MB to draw one map

Opening the routes page used to fetch the full GPS track of every route on the site before you had chosen anything — 169 files, 41 MB, with browser caching deliberately switched off, so a reload paid for it all again. On a phone in the valley on the morning of a walk, that is a serious chunk of a data plan. The map now loads one small file instead, 281 KB, and not until you scroll to it. The drawn lines are simplified for an overview map; every route's full GPX download is unchanged. The page also has a search box now, so you can find a walk by where it starts rather than scrolling past 168 cards.
MINOR

The Fell Report signup was hard to read, and on the home page barely a box at all

The email signup in the footer was styled for a light background and then placed on the dark green one, so its heading and small print sat at about a fifth of the contrast they needed and the button all but vanished into the background. On the home page the styling was missing altogether, leaving a plain browser input and button too small to tap comfortably. Both are fixed everywhere the box appears.
MINOR

Every place we know to leave a car, on one page

A new guide gathers all 1,043 parking places behind the fell and route pages into a single map and list — 464 free, 197 that charge, 542 car parks, 398 lay-bys and 103 verges — filterable by charge, kind, bus route, facilities and whether we know the space count, and it filters without JavaScript. It is the first place on the site to surface the fallback chains: where a car park has known alternatives, the page says which and how far. Provenance is stated rather than implied, including the 244 entries we hold a position for and no details at all. It carries no prices and no risk ratings — the page explains why on both counts. Marked beta while the data is validated in the field; corrections go to parking@hikes.guide.
MINOR

A standing line about leaving a car, on every page that lists parking

Fell, route and place pages now carry one short, calm note beside the parking block: vehicles are left entirely at their owner's risk, we list places people park but cannot vouch for any of them, and the practical advice is to take valuables with you, leave nothing on show, and park somewhere else if a spot feels wrong when you get there. It is deliberately a standing condition of parking anywhere rather than a warning about any particular site — we publish no safety rating, no incident counts and no claim that any place is safe, because the police data behind such claims is anonymised to approximate points and would overstate the risk at named car parks. It appears once per page, not once per car park.
MINOR

Wide tables now scroll on a phone instead of moving the page

Every data table on the feature guides — 54 of them across 21 pages — now scrolls inside its own box. Before this, a table wider than a phone screen could drag the whole page sideways as you read, or, worse on one page, push its contents links off the edge where they could not be reached at all. The tables themselves are unchanged; only where the scrolling happens has. Found by checking the last-petrol page on a 375-pixel screen, which is the width of a fairly ordinary phone.
MEDIUM

Strip-maps for the drive in, and the first fuel of the morning

The last-petrol page now draws each drive in as a strip-map: a single road-line from where you leave the fast road to the valley head, every filling station marked at its true distance along that road, the last one flagged, and the gap beyond it shaded with its length written into it. Nine of them, one per corridor, drawn to scale — so the picture is the measurement rather than an illustration of it. The longest gap is 24.5 km, from Bridge End Garage in Egremont to Wasdale Head coming down the coast; the shortest is 9.9 km into Mardale. Two of the drives share every road but the last and are drawn as one fork, because the shared stretch is genuinely one drive and only the gap at the end differs. Penrith Truckstop is drawn on its line and struck through: it is fuel-card only, no petrol and no cash, and your map app will offer it to you at one in the morning. Alongside it, a new panel answers the other half of the question — if you are setting off before the shops open, which is the first place on your road that is actually open, last station first. Every number is the one already published in the tables below it; the drawings measure nothing new. Also fixed: on a phone the tables were pushing the whole page sideways.
MEDIUM

The last petrol before Wasdale: fuel, shops and cash on the drive in

Where the last filling station, shop and cash machine actually are before each of the seven dead-end valleys — measured along the road rather than as a straight line, and verified against the operator's own source or the government's statutory fuel register rather than off a map. The page leads with what you PASS coming in, not what is nearest, because the two turn out to differ by up to 16 km: Eskdale's nearest fuel is 12.0 km away, but arriving from the M6 the last station on that road leaves 28.2 km still to drive. Fuel is the boring half — every valley sits 9.9 to 18.2 km from a pump, a factor of 1.8. The last shop ranges from 0.2 km at Glenridding to 13.3 km at Seathwaite, a factor of 66. Every corridor names the roads it uses, so a route over Wrynose and Hardknott says so. Checked 8 August 2026, and the page declares its own age.
MEDIUM

The skyline, drawn: four summits and what the sun has to climb over

The sunrise page has always argued that a summit's horizon is made of other fells and that the sun has to clear them. It now draws it: four summits, each with its whole 360-degree skyline as a solid silhouette, every sunrise and sunset of the year marked at the bearing it crosses. Carl Side has Skiddaw standing 13.7 degrees up across its north-east, so the midsummer sun climbs the shoulder of it and arrives 95 minutes late, where the midwinter sun clears open ground and is 2 minutes late. Helvellyn has nothing above the horizontal anywhere. All four share one vertical scale so they can be read against each other, exaggerated about four times, and the caption says so.
MEDIUM

Pick a date, and see which summits get the sun first

The sunrise page has always answered "when does my fell get the sun?". It now answers it the other way round: pick one of the sixteen dates we model and see the five summits that catch the light first and the five that hold it longest. Often there is no single winner - seven summits share first light on the shortest day, ten share it on New Year's Day - so the page names the count rather than crowning a fell, and equal times get equal ranks. It covers the sixteen dates the dataset actually solved, not any date you like. It is a geometry table, not a recommendation: we still publish no time to set off or start down.
MEDIUM

The sunrise page grows its evening half

We have held last-light figures for all 214 summits since the start of the month, and the page that explains them was still telling only the morning story. It now tells both ends: the fells that lose the sun first, those that hold it longest, and the 48 that keep it past the valley's own sunset. Castle Crag loses the sun at 19:30 on midsummer's evening; Helvellyn, nine kilometres away, keeps it until 22:00. Putting the two together showed something neither half did: summits lose light far more easily than they gain it. The best gain is seven minutes at dawn; the worst loss is 143 minutes at dusk. It still will not tell you when to start down.
MINOR

First-aid pocket cards you can print, fold and carry

The two decisions in the fell first-aid guide you will least want to be reading off a phone screen - the DR ABC primary survey, and whether to walk someone out or call Mountain Rescue - are now on four cards you print on a single sheet of A4, cut into quarters and fold. No double-sided printing and no special paper: the backs are printed upside down on purpose so each card lands the right way up, and Lee tested the geometry on real paper first. The other cards carry the kit list, the hypothermia signs, and a plan you fill in by hand before you go. Every word is lifted from the guide unchanged. It is still not a substitute for a first-aid course, and the cards say so.
MEDIUM

Parking, overnight rules and how long it takes, now on the place pages

Our place pages told you what a valley was and which fells were near it, then went quiet on the three things people actually ask: where do I park, can I sleep there, and how long is the walk. Fifty-five of the fifty-six now carry the car parks near them with whether each charges and who runs it, thirty-two carry the land manager's own published position on overnight parking quoted word for word, and forty-nine list the walks that start on the doorstep. Where no published rule exists we say nothing, because that is not the same as permission. We print no price, no claim about how early a car park fills, and no time to leave by.
MINOR

Seventeen parking pins moved to where the map actually puts the car park

Sadgill in Longsleddale was 236 m from the parking it describes, the Kentmere Institute 179 m, and the Gale Road pin for Latrigg 150 m. Those three and fourteen more are now on the mapped car park. Seven are corroborated by one of our own recorded walk starts landing within 25 m of the new position; the rest rest on an unambiguous OpenStreetMap match with nothing competing. Three came out of a pile we had set aside as unanswerable, where several car parks sat close together and no name matched - asking which one our own walks started inside settled it. What this does not promise is the entrance: 74 of our 157 spots sit on a mapped area more than 25 m across.
MEDIUM

Charge While You Climb: every Lake District trailhead charger we could verify, and the gaps

A new feature page answering a question nobody else answers in walker-shaped form: can you charge the car while you are on the fell? We checked 51 candidate chargers against operators' own published information and 18 survived. The honest headline is the gap - 47 of the 157 places we publish parking for have nothing recorded within 5 km, including Rosthwaite and Stonethwaite, which are how you reach Great Gable and the Scafells. Six walks in the whole National Park start beside a verified public charger, and they are really three car parks. Charge is given in kWh, never as a percentage of a battery.
MEDIUM

Correction: four car parks we listed as free actually charge

Maggie's Bridge at Loweswater, Walna Scar Road above Coniston, Cow Bridge at Hartsop and Scout Scar outside Kendal were all shown here as free, and all four charge. Our own data had them right; the name and the note printed on the page did not, and the name is what you read. Both are corrected, and the build now refuses to ship an entry whose name contradicts its own fee, so this particular mistake cannot come back. The same sweep re-checked all 157 parking locations against the surveyed map, our recorded walks and the tracks on our own routes, and found two pinned in the wrong valley: Seathwaite in the Duddon was pinned at Coniston, seven kilometres away, and Dockray was pinned in Penrith, fifteen. Both now point where their names say. The pin at the top of Honister Pass has moved onto the slate mine's own car park and now says which one it is — there are two up there, about 170 metres apart, and the other belongs to the National Trust.
MAJOR

The navigation guide now lets you practise on real Lakeland, and works out its own magnetic north

Reading about contours is not the same as reading contours. The field guide now has three self-check drills built from the elevation model this site already runs on: fifteen patches of real ground to call spur, saddle or re-entrant; eight two-kilometre panels with a summit marked, for six-figure grid references; and six legs between named summits with a compass bezel you turn to the bearing — drag it, or use the buttons. Nothing is scored, nothing is timed and no streak is kept. A wrong answer explains the shape, or names the tenths you misjudged, or tells you how far off the summit you would finish. Every answer is computed rather than remembered, and each grid reference matches the one on that fell's own page. Section six has stopped asserting a date-stamped fact and started calculating it: magnetic north currently sits about three quarters of a degree east of grid north over the Lakes, and the page now says so with the figure, the source and the year the advice expires.
MAJOR

You can now see what fifty metres of visibility actually leaves you

The Clag Index page told you which fells are hardest to stay found on. It now shows you. Twelve summits where the trap is confirmed are drawn from the elevation model twice over: the whole top as a map shows it, and then only the ground you could see in cloud — everything beyond about fifty metres removed. High Raise's circle is nearly empty, and that emptiness is the whole problem. Helvellyn's contains the edge. Two of the twelve are boulder mazes that a 30-metre model simply cannot draw, and those two say so on their face rather than looking deceptively calm.
MINOR

Planning one fell? You no longer have to read a 214-row table

Type a fell name at the top of the Clag Index and you get a short briefing on that one top — how hard it is to stay found on, which of the three traps it has, and the note from actually walking it where one exists, word for word as it appears on the fell's own page. The address updates as you go, so a warning can be pasted straight into a group chat. The full table is still there underneath.
MINOR

The navigation guide will now quiz you on real Lakeland ground

Reading contour shapes is a skill you cannot get from a diagram of an imaginary hill. The contour section now offers fifteen patches of actual fellside — spur, saddle or re-entrant? — drawn from the same elevation data as the rest of the site, and it tells you afterwards exactly which hillside you were looking at. Nothing is scored, timed or counted: getting these right is not the same as being able to navigate, and the page says so every time.
MINOR

Thirty-eight more places to park

The parking list grew from 119 to 157. Every position was checked on the map before it went in, and the ones that are roadside or a verge rather than a car park are named and labelled as such, because turning up expecting a car park and finding a single-track lane is worse than not knowing. Also fixed: a fell's page could name the nearest car park we held even when it was miles away — Brant Fell above Bowness was pointing at Hawkshead, across the lake.
MINOR

The Ullswater Steamer is a walking tool, and nobody writes about it that way

The boat companies sell the lake as a cruise and the walking sites start every Ullswater route from a car park — so the most useful thing about the steamer goes unsaid. It solves a parking problem: Howtown sits under a cluster of quiet Far Eastern fells (Hallin Fell, Steel Knotts, Bonscale Pike, Arthur's Pike) at the end of a narrow lane with nowhere to leave a car, and the pier gets you there without one. It also turns out-and-backs into point-to-points — sail Glenridding to Howtown and walk back over Place Fell and you get a high traverse instead of the same ground twice. We've added the boat as transport to the Ullswater, Glenridding and Patterdale pages (Pooley Bridge already said it), and to four routes it genuinely helps. One piece of advice throughout: take the boat first and walk back, so a slow day can't become a missed last sailing. We deliberately publish no departure times or fares — a stale one would be worse than none — only a link to the operator's timetable and the date we checked.
MINOR

Every route page said “hiking” while the rest of the site said “walking”

All 155 route pages were titled “… Hiking Route”, but the fell pages have always said “Walking Guide” — so the site was using two words for the same thing. British walkers overwhelmingly say walk (Catbells: 4,700 searches a month for “walk” against 10 for “hike”), and that holds even on Scafell Pike, so it is now walking everywhere in page titles. The bad-weather guide is renamed to match the name the rest of the site already links to it by. No web addresses changed, so every existing link and bookmark still works.
MINOR

The collection pages that were hiding their own descriptions

A collection only showed the little description under each walk once nearly all of them had one, so a page with a couple of gaps showed none at all and read as bare. The rule was counting the fells on those pages as missing descriptions when they had perfectly good ones of their own, which meant some collections could never have qualified however much was written. Fixed — 22 collection pages now show them, up from one.
MINOR

Every fell page was carrying 620KB it almost never used

Each fell page was loading Lee's entire Strava history — 454 walks — before it would finish, to fill in a “my hikes over this fell” panel near the very bottom that usually matches one of them. It now loads only if you scroll that far, which takes about 70% of the JavaScript off the page. The fell pages also stop laying out the parts of the page you cannot see yet, and the stylesheets arrive as one file instead of four.
MINOR

The three questions people actually ask, answered on every fell page

Is it a Wainwright, where do I park, and how hard is it — the three questions that sit under nearly every search we see. They are now answered on each fell page from the data the site already holds: the list memberships, the nearest car park within 2.5 km measured straight-line, and the route's difficulty axes. Where a fell already has a hand-written answer to one of the three, the hand-written one stands and the generated one stays out of the way. A fell with no route on file gets no difficulty answer rather than a guess.
MAJOR

Every hiking word we use, and what all 214 fell names mean

A glossary of 256 terms, from the ones you can guess (col, tarn, scree) to the ones nobody explains (clag, Birkett, bagging, a rake, a rigg). Each is written as a walker would say it rather than as a dictionary would, and where a word appears on our own pages it links back to the fells and routes that use it. The second half turned out to be the interesting one. Of the 443 name-elements behind the 214 Wainwrights, most are not English. Fell, tarn, force, gill, howe and thwaite are Old Norse; crag, pen and blen are Brittonic, older still, left by people who were here before either. The map carries three languages at once, and the names quietly record who named what. That is drawn rather than described. All 214 are plotted on a relief map, marked by the oldest language in the name, so the Norse ground and the Brittonic pockets separate on sight. Where a name has a contested origin we say so instead of choosing the tidier story.
MAJOR

Is that waterfall actually running today?

The commonest disappointment at a Lakeland waterfall is arriving to find a damp streak on a rock. All 15 now carry a verdict for the next two days, worked from the rainfall forecast for the fell area each one drains against how much rain that particular fall needs before it performs. They are not equal: a big catchment keeps a fall going through a dry week, while a small steep one needs rain in the last day or two or there is nothing to see. Each verdict shows the number behind it, so you can disagree with it. It is a forecast of rain rather than a measurement of water, and a fall below a reservoir answers to the gate rather than the sky - both of which the page says on its face.
MINOR

The events finder that had never once run

Put in the dates you are in the Lakes and the events page now shows what is on while you are there. It has looked like that was possible for a while. It was not: the code doing the filtering sat on a different page entirely, where the first thing it did was look for a control that was not there and give up. The section rendered and did nothing, on every visit, from the day it was added. It works now, and the dates go into the address bar, so a filtered list is a link you can send to whoever you are going with.
MINOR

The photographs were several times larger than the space they filled

Card pictures on the lakes and waterfalls pages are about 290 pixels wide at most. We were sending files up to 1400 wide to fill them - roughly five times the detail the space could show, seventeen times over on a single screen. Each card now arrives in a size chosen for the screen asking for it, taking a typical one from about 90 kilobytes to 17. Nothing looks different, which is the point. It matters on a phone on mobile data at the start of a walk, which is when these pages actually get opened.
MINOR

Three things that vanished if you used the site in dark mode

The View Report's table of what can be seen from each summit was built on pale striped rows. In dark mode the stripes stayed pale while the text turned light, leaving 321 cells of near-white on near-white - a contrast of about 1.15 to 1, where 4.5 is the readable floor. The note about seeing the Isle of Man was worse at 1.07, and the good-conditions verdict on the things-to-do page had the same fault. All three were backgrounds given a fixed colour long before dark mode existed, so they never changed with it. They were found by measuring every element on nineteen pages in both themes rather than by looking - which is the only way this kind of fault surfaces, since it is invisible unless you use the theme it breaks.
MAJOR

Every lake in section, and the waters page rebuilt

The lakes page now opens its comparison section with a drawing rather than a table: all 17 lakes in one continuous cross-section, deepest first, on a shared waterline. Wast Water's 79 m against Elter Water's 7 m is more than eleven to one, and it was invisible in a column of figures. The uncertainty is drawn too - only 6 of the 17 depths come from a survey we can cite, and the other 11 fade towards their floor behind a broken line, meaning we are less sure of the number, not that the lake is shallower. Depth and length cannot share a scale, so the vertical is exaggerated about 294 times and the chart says so. No figure appears in it that the table beneath does not already publish. The page around it also picks up the site's current design, which it had never been switched on for: headings are one size for one role instead of three, the content sits on a measured page rather than running edge to edge, and the tap targets are finger-sized.
MINOR

Four things you could not read, and one that was empty

On the waterfalls page the Download the data button was rust-brown text on its own dark green background - 1.02 to 1, which is to say invisible. Not a waterfalls fault: the redesign recolours links inside a content card, and this button style was left off the list of exceptions, so it broke wherever one appeared. Fixed everywhere, with the other button styles audited for the same collision. Under Managing bodies and sources the same page printed a row of bare dots - eight empty links and eight keyboard stops announcing nothing, on the section that backs its claim to be independently sourced. It now lists the two real sources, and the build refuses to publish a source it cannot name. Separately, two feature pages were unreadable in dark mode: the central claim on the drinking-water piece sat at 1.25 to 1, and parts of the mountain rescue report near 2 to 1. Both pages now pass in either theme.
MAJOR

When the sun leaves each summit - and an admission about when it arrives

Every Wainwright page told you when the sun first clears that summit's own skyline. It now tells you when it leaves. The two are not mirror images - a fell can have an open eastern horizon and a wall to the west - but both come from one calculation against one 360-degree profile, so they cannot disagree. Castle Crag loses the sun at 19:30 on a midsummer evening; Helvellyn, ten miles away, holds it to 22:00. 48 of the 214 keep it past the valley's sunset on every date we model. Only those 214 have a profile; the rest show nothing rather than a guess. The admission: on 24 fells the sentence above the sunrise table contradicted the figures beneath it - Loft Crag claimed first light within half an hour of sunrise directly above a row reading 50 minutes. It described a fell's typical morning, and a fell whose sunrise bearing swings 87 degrees across the year has no typical morning. Descriptions are now pinned to each fell's hardest day and name the date. We have also stopped averaging horizon height across a 90-degree arc, which cannot see the one ridge in the way: Green Gable averages 1.8 degrees and still loses 92 minutes to Great Gable. Pages now name the bearing and what stands there. Model outputs, each with its plus-or-minus band, and not a descent plan.
MAJOR

The perfect round now stays on ground you are allowed to walk

The graph our 214-Wainwright round was solved on carried no access information, so nothing stopped the route cutting across land the map marks as private. Everything tagged private or barred is now removed before solving. Rights of way crossing private land stay in - an earlier version of this check wrongly treated those as barriers too, which is worth admitting. The fix costs about five minutes and a kilometre: 7 days 15 hours 20 minutes, 600.5 km, 45,089 m of ascent. Still a model output rather than a walked time, and best-found rather than proven optimal.
MAJOR

One measure for the guides, real geography for the beck map, and a brand bar that lines up

A tidy-up of things that had drifted. Text on every feature page now starts at the same left edge as the wordmark above it, where before it started in nine different places depending on which generator wrote the page; the build now refuses to publish a feature page whose header is wrong. The brand bar, misaligned on almost every page type, now lines up everywhere. The beck map on the drinking-water piece is rebuilt on real geography - true lake outlines and the National Park boundary from OpenStreetMap, computer-placed labels, a scale bar and a north arrow. It used to draw each lake as an ellipse from a typed-in centre, putting unrecognisable blobs where Derwentwater and Ullswater should be. Walks by difficulty now leads each walk with its exposure grade, because the difficulty band only describes how big the day is, not how safe. The sunrise piece gains leave-by times and a two-day view of whether the tops are forecast clear - a daylight-pace model, and people are slower by head torch, so leave earlier.
MAJOR

The fells the map can't take you up

We checked 378 lesser-known fells - Birketts, Synges, Outlying Fells and Fellranger tops beyond the famous 214 - against the two open datasets supposed to say where you may walk. For 346 of them, 92%, the answer is clean, and that is the headline: the right to roam works almost everywhere here. Four fells above Thirlmere have paths, waymarks, car parks and an open invitation from United Utilities, none of which appears in the national dataset, because permissive access is not CRoW access. Fourteen ended with the record genuinely silent, and we name them - a statement about mapping, not about the ground, and emphatically not about the law. They are often walked without incident. We publish no approach detail for them, because pointing someone at a line we cannot tie to a right or an invitation is not guidance.
MAJOR

First light: when the sun actually clears each summit's skyline

Every sunrise time you read is computed for a flat horizon at sea level. On a fell you are looking at other fells. We have solved that moment for the 214 summits we hold a 360-degree horizon profile for: midsummer, equinox and midwinter, a chart of the skyline against the sun's path, and a date picker for any date. Carl Side waits 95 minutes longer than published sunrise because Skiddaw is in the way; 43 summits wait meaningfully longer, and 37 catch the sun early. Every time carries a plus-or-minus band floored at five minutes - a 30 m terrain model smooths aretes and cannot see a boulder. A feature page explains the method and what we deliberately do not tell you: not what time to set off, and nothing about the night sky.
MAJOR

Correction: the computed Wainwright round was two days too slow

We published the best-found round of all 214 Wainwrights at 8 days 17 hours. It is 7 days 15 hours, and the difference was our arithmetic, not the route. The model applied Langmuir's steep-descent corrections on top of Naismith's rule; tested against 38 of our own recorded Lakeland walks, that correction makes the estimate worse, and it was adding 36 hours. The pace factor was wrong the other way - fitted against what our GPS watch reports, then applied to figures the solver takes from the map. The method note now says all of this, and the superseded figures remain reproducible from the same code. The perfect Wainwright round →
MEDIUM

Seven new waterfall guides, and the hub grows to fifteen

Ritson's Force, Colwith Force, Moss Force, Dungeon Ghyll Force, Taylor Gill Force, Tom Gill and Sour Milk Gill (Easedale) each get a full page, and all seven join the waterfalls hub, its map and its comparison table. Wasdale, Coniston and Grasmere join for the first time. Heights are quoted as the sources hedge them: where a figure is cited as a range we show the lower one and say so, and Tom Gill and Sour Milk Gill carry no height at all, because none is reliably published and we would rather leave a gap than invent a number. The waterfalls hub →
MAJOR

The perfect Wainwright round, according to the map

We built a map of every path, track, bridleway and road in the Lake District and asked it for the quickest continuous round of all 214 Wainwrights. It comes out longer, hillier and slower than the actual record - which is the point of the piece, not a flaw in it. Record-setters do not follow paths; they run the direct line over open fell and down trods no survey has recorded, so that ground is not in our graph. Ours is longer because we deleted the ground they run on. A model output rather than a walked time, and best-found rather than proven optimal - we publish the solver and its settings so anyone can beat it. It also turned up something we did not expect: the shortest round is the hilliest, because minimising distance drives the line straight over tops. Read the piece →
MINOR

The Old Man of Coniston, answered honestly: how hard is it really?

More people ask whether a beginner can climb the Old Man of Coniston than ask it of any other fell we have looked at, and the honest answer is a conditional yes. The page leads with it: yes on the tourist path in settled weather, but at 802 m this is a real mountain day, not a stroll. It answers the three questions that always follow - children, dogs and footwear - with the dog answer drawn from our own survey of the gates and stiles on each mapped line. No, it is not a scramble. The disused slate and copper workings are extraordinary to walk past and not somewhere to go inside, which is Coniston Mountain Rescue Team's standing advice as well as ours. The Old Man of Coniston →
MINOR

Better connected data features, dated event pages, sharper accessibility

The Mountain Rescue report, the descent guide and the lists-overlap page now link the fells they talk about (they previously named them without a single link), and every mine-water warning links the full beck dataset behind it. Event pages with a confirmed date now say so in the title — Ambleside Sports 2026, not just Ambleside Sports. Plus an accessibility pass: better contrast on the footer's cookie button, underlined breadcrumb links on feature pages, and bigger touch targets in the data tables. See the dated event guides →
MEDIUM

Sturdier, faster list pages — and a build that guards its own honesty

The two biggest fell lists (the 537 Birketts and 501 Synges) could stall a slow device building their map of five hundred markers the moment the page opened. The map now loads only when you scroll to it, and the lists render instantly — every fell and link is baked into the page itself, so nothing depends on scripts. Five collection pages also linked the easy-walks hub at a dead address; fixed at the source. And a new build-time check now fails the build if any page's title, description, heading or links ever quietly move behind JavaScript.
MAJOR

Every Wainwright now has a route — all 214, done

A milestone: with the latest batch of route guides, every one of the 214 Wainwrights is now covered by at least one full route on the site — map, elevation profile, GPX, parking, buses, water and shelter, the daylight planner and an honest difficulty grade. The last thirty to fall were the quiet western fells: the Mosedale Horseshoe over Pillar, Steeple, Scoat Fell and Red Pike, Yewbarrow, the Nether Wasdale round of Middle Fell, Haycock, Seatallan and Buckbarrow, the High Stile ridge above Buttermere, the Loweswater trio of Mellbreak, Hen Comb and Low Fell, and Back o’ Skiddaw — Carrock Fell, High Pike, Knott and Great Calva. All 123 routes are on the routes hub, and each fell page links the routes that cross its summit. Browse all 123 routes →
MINOR

A steadier layout on every page

Behind-the-scenes consistency work: every page now draws its column width, side gutters and corner rounding from one shared set of design values, so sections line up on the same edge and the same shapes repeat everywhere. Most visibly: the conditions page's fell list no longer scrolls inside its own box, and the conditions and weather pages sit on the same width as the rest of the site. A build-time check now stops new one-off values creeping back in. See the conditions page →
MAJOR

A new look for the whole site — and a dark mode

Every page has been redesigned. The new look leans on warm paper tones, a forest-green frame and a proper typographic hierarchy, so a fell page reads more like a well-made printed guide and less like a database: bigger type, clearer headings, and more room around the things you actually came for — the route, the conditions and the hazards. Nothing was dropped to get there. The fell pages keep their live summit forecast, Clag Index, Mountain Rescue hazard notes, The View, beck-water cautions, FAQs and route lists; the routes hub keeps every filter. There is also a dark mode now, on every page — the moon button in the header switches it, and your choice is remembered on that device. Two practical changes are worth knowing about: the interactive map of every fell has moved off the front page to its own page, so the homepage can open with a walk finder instead; and every page now carries a real, visible heading, which helps screen readers and search engines alike. Fell pages lead with a photograph where there is one — that is 138 of them so far, and the rest show a plain green header rather than a stand-in image until a real photo exists. The Wainwrights map →
MINOR

The Wainwrights page now answers “how many…?” — and its map is finally findable

The fell-list pages have carried a full interactive map of every summit for a while, and never once said the word “map” in a title or heading — so nobody searching for one could find it. Each list page now names and anchors its map properly. The Wainwrights page also gains a “how many Wainwrights…?” section answering the questions people actually ask: how many there are, how many books, how many summits each of the big horseshoes crosses, and how many are also Marilyns or Nuttalls. Every figure is computed from our own route and list data when the page is built, so none can drift or be mistyped — and where two of our routes over the same horseshoe genuinely disagree, the page names both rather than quietly picking one. Questions we cannot answer from our own data simply aren’t there. Also fixed: the book cover on all eight list pages was rendering stretched to nearly three times its proper height.
MEDIUM

"How hard is it, really?" — straight answers on nine fells

The question people actually ask before a walk isn't "is this dangerous?" — it's "can I manage it?" Nine fells now answer that head-on, in a block near the top of the page. Skiddaw compares itself honestly against Scafell Pike; Helm Crag explains that you do not have to climb the Howitzer to have walked it; Crinkle Crags tells you where the Bad Step is and which side the bypass runs; Pavey Ark explains how to avoid Jack's Rake, and how it really differs from Striding Edge; Great Gable makes the case that its danger is navigational rather than exposure. The comparisons are generated from our own five-axis route gradings rather than typed by hand, so they can't drift out of date — and where we hold no data for a hill, we say so instead of guessing. Take a look →
MINOR

Steadier pages, and fuller write-ups for 14 quieter fells

Two under-the-hood improvements. Every fell photo now reserves its space before it loads, so the text no longer nudges downward as the page settles — the kind of thing you only notice by its absence. And 14 of the quieter Outlying Fells around Devoke Water and the Duddon valley — Yoadcastle, The Pike, Rough Crag, Seat How and others — have swapped their generic “this is a Birkett” boilerplate for a proper description of what each summit actually is and why you'd go. Take a look →
MAJOR

Every route, one page - the routes hub is now the complete index

The routes page previously showed only the fell days - more than half the site's walks (the gentle lakeshore, waterfall and family outings) lived on a separate easy-walks page that was easy to miss, which made routes genuinely hard to find. The hub now lists every route on the site, with filters for time, distance, region, dogs and knee-friendly descents. The time filter matches the honest fast-steady walking range shown on each card, never a single optimistic figure; the dog and knee filters show only routes where our gate-by-gate Stile & Gate Census found a clear green - unknown is never counted as a yes. Two new honest collections join it: dog-friendly walks (35 routes with no stiles blocking the way round) and pushchair-friendly walks (the deliberately short list that genuinely works). The easy & family walks page carries on unchanged. Take a look →
MINOR

Blencathra: do you have to cross Sharp Edge?

Blencathra's page now leads with the question people actually ask before they go — not 'is it dangerous?' but 'do I have to cross Sharp Edge?' The honest answer is no: the walking lines up Scales Fell and Blease Fell reach the same summit without ever touching the arête. Sharp Edge itself is described straight — a polished, exposed Grade 1 scramble with unprotected drops on both sides, lethal when wet or icy — so you can match the route to your experience, not to the summit. The quick-answers box up top carries the same reassurance. Take a look →
MINOR

Quick answers at the top of the busiest fell pages

The most-visited fell pages now open with a short summary box — the things people actually arrive for — before the write-up: height, how long a round takes, how hard it really is, today's summit weather, whether it's dangerous, and how to get there. Every line is specific to that fell, not filler, and links straight down to the full detail below. The busy honeypots and the serious mountains lead with different answers in a different order: a family favourite opens with how to get there and how hard it really is; a big peak opens with the weather and the safety picture. It is on a first set of popular fells for now. Take a look →
MAJOR

The View: a computed 360-degree panorama from every Wainwright summit

Every one of the 214 Wainwright summit pages now has a new 'The View' section: a computed 360-degree skyline showing the named fells and distant landmarks you can see from the top, each labelled by distance and bearing. Drag to pan around the horizon, show more labels, or reveal the far four-nations view — on the clearest days Scafell Pike looks out to Snowdon in Wales, Snaefell on the Isle of Man, the Galloway hills of Scotland, and the Mourne Mountains of Ireland. It is computed from terrain data, not photographed, and it is honest about that: it shows what you could see in perfect clarity, with every distant sighting tiered by how often the air is actually clear enough — from 'most days' to 'a handful of days a year'. There is a full, sourced explanation of how it works, and its honest limits, on the new How we compute the view page. Take a look →
MINOR

Faster discovery for the AI assistants

We now notify IndexNow whenever a page genuinely changes, so Bing — and through it ChatGPT Search, Copilot and Perplexity — picks up new and updated pages quickly. This is deliberately about AI discovery, not Google (which does not use IndexNow); our Google results are unaffected. It only ever sends the handful of pages that really changed, never the whole site.
MEDIUM

A rebuilt Catbells page: how hard it really is, and three honest ways to get there

Catbells is one of the most-searched fells in the Lakes, and the questions people actually ask are whether it is OK for beginners, whether it is easier than Latrigg, whether the dog can come, and above all where to park. We answered them from our own data: a plain-spoken difficulty verdict (with a Latrigg comparison drawn straight from our five-axis route gradings, and the dog-friendly verdict from our Stile & Gate Census), plus a new Getting there section built around the three honest ways to the foot of the fell — the flat walk from Keswick, the Keswick Launch across Derwentwater, and driving, which is frankly a gamble. We deliberately do not publish parking we have not verified, or tearoom hours we cannot vouch for. Take a look →
MINOR

Our open datasets are now properly catalogued and clearly licensed

Fixed the structured data on every downloadable dataset so search engines and Google Dataset Search list them correctly, and gave each a clear licence — our own compiled datasets under Creative Commons BY 4.0, the Environment Agency and Met Office data under the Open Government Licence. A journalist or researcher can now find them and reuse them with confidence. Take a look →
MEDIUM

New: water, shelter and buses on every route

Route pages now show the facilities that actually matter on the walk itself, read from OpenStreetMap: where the drinking water is, any shelter or bothy on the line, en-route toilets, and the bus stop and campsite at the trailhead. Fell pages inherit them from each route that climbs the fell, labelled by route — because ‘the nearest water to a summit’ depends entirely on which way you walk up. And we’re honest about the gaps: where we have no mapped water or shelter, we say so plainly rather than imply there is none — an absent marker isn’t a missing tap. Curated parking, toilets and cafés stay where they were. © OpenStreetMap contributors. Browse routes →
MAJOR

New: The descent is the dangerous half

A new feature on the part of the walk people plan least. In the largest published study, about three-quarters of hiker falls happen on the way down — and your own body explains why: going downhill loads the thigh muscles in a braking action that causes more damage and soreness than climbing, puts more force through the knees, and quietly erodes your balance for hours after you’re down, sometimes even when your legs still feel strong. We set the evidence out honestly, with its limits (it is overseas falls data, not a UK all-incident count), the biomechanics with proper sources, the case for poles, and the daylight arithmetic that turns a ‘5-hour’ route into a seven-hour day. Plus a tool nobody else has: the steepest sustained descent on every one of our 67 routes — the same ‘Knees’ verdict shown on each route page — ranked, and downloadable as a CSV. The one thing to take from it: decide your turn-back time before you set off. Read it →
MEDIUM

Scafell Pike, answered honestly: how hard it really is, and is it dangerous?

England’s highest mountain now has two new blocks that answer the questions people actually ask — from our own data, not opinion. “How hard is Scafell Pike, really?” gives a candid verdict: a hard but non-technical day, about the same overall as Helvellyn or Skiddaw but more serious underfoot and materially harder to navigate; a conditional, honest answer to “can a beginner do it?”; and where we have no data — for Snowdon — we say so rather than guess. “Is Scafell Pike dangerous?” names the two places that actually catch people (Piers Gill and Broad Stand) and, as with every fell, refuses to invent a death count. We’ve also added straight answers to where it is, how high it is (978 m / 3,209 ft), which OS map to carry (OL6), where to check the weather (no fake webcams), and why the summit is a First World War memorial. And every route’s headline time is now shown as an honest range rather than an optimistic single figure. Scafell Pike →
MEDIUM

A specific warning about Piers Gill on Scafell Pike

At the request of Wasdale Mountain Rescue Team, we’ve added their Piers Gill guidance to our Scafell Pike routes and hazard notes. It is the trap the team most want walkers to understand: the top of the gill looks harmless, but never try to descend it or walk down the stream bed. On the Corridor Route the safe line is to go round the corner and slightly uphill, <strong>well away from the gill</strong>, down to Sty Head. The west bank has no path and the team report fatalities there. And the part that matters most: <strong>there is no mobile phone signal at the gill</strong>, so ‘stay put and call 999’ may be impossible — get back up to where you have signal, or attract attention. As the team put it, none of the walkers in the recent incidents intended to be where they were found. Scafell Pike safety →
MINOR

Faster fell pages — and twelve more fells now findable in search

A behind-the-scenes tidy-up after a full crawl of the site. We compressed the fell and place photos — 66 MB lighter overall, so pages load quicker on a phone with one bar in the valley — and gave every image fixed dimensions so nothing jumps around as the page loads. Twelve smaller fells that were previously hidden from search are now included: each is crossed by one of our walking routes, so it now has something genuinely useful to say. Under the hood we also tightened page titles and descriptions that search engines were cutting off mid-word, added standard security headers, and updated the homepage title to the hikes.guide name. Browse the fells →
MINOR

Tightened the site’s secure connection

Browsers are now told to always use the encrypted (HTTPS) version of hikes.guide for the next year, so there’s never a moment on an insecure connection when you open the site. A small, behind-the-scenes safety change — nothing to do on your end.
MAJOR

New: Summer on the Fells — what actually hurts people

Ask a walker what frightens them about a summer day in the Lakes and you’ll hear about adders, lightning, something in the water. Now look at the record: nobody has died of an adder bite in Britain since 1975; wasps and bees kill three or four people a year; and about twenty-one people a year die in the Lake District fells — of a slip, a wrong turn, a day that ran out of light. Our new summer guide ranks the season’s hazards by evidence, not fear: the thirty-minute heat rule, the dog section we most want you to read (most canine heat illness follows an ordinary walk, at a median of 16.9°C — not a heatwave), cold water shock, the lightning rule nobody knows (a low fell offers no protection at all), cattle, ticks, and the actual law on barbecues. Every figure is dated and sourced, the full evidence base is downloadable, and where the evidence doesn’t exist we say so rather than guess. There’s a printable five-minute checklist to take to the car park. Read Summer on the Fells →
MAJOR

New: six new route guides — including the four everyone asks for

Six new routes join the collection (now 67): Helvellyn from Swirls — the walkers’ route up the big one, no scrambling, no edges; Scafell Pike from Wasdale by Lingmell Col; Blencathra via Sharp Edge, graded Severe and meant seriously; the quick hike up Catbells; and two bigger rounds, Angletarn Pikes with its neighbouring fells and the Grasmoor group. All six carry the honest ‘drawn but not yet personally walked’ badge until they’re walked. And an honesty fix across every route: exposure ratings that were computed from gradient alone — which cannot tell a knife-edge arete from a steep grass slope — now say ‘not assessed’ instead of guessing. A confident wrong number on the one axis where being wrong has consequences was not acceptable; an honest blank is. Browse the routes →
MEDIUM

Fell forecasts now load instantly — and work without JavaScript

Every fell page now carries a real 7-day summit forecast baked into the page itself — temperatures, gusts and rain, adjusted to the summit’s altitude — refreshed nightly and stamped with when it was taken. Your browser still swaps in the live forecast the moment it loads, and if that fails the snapshot stands, honestly labelled. No more empty box while you wait, and the forecast is there even with JavaScript off. Pick a fell →
MEDIUM

New: “Is Helvellyn dangerous?” — an honest answer on the fell page

Thousands of people a month ask why walkers die on Helvellyn, and the question deserves better than tabloid coverage. The fell page now answers it straight: the danger is not where most people think. The edges are genuine scrambles that deserve respect — but what mountain rescue is actually called to, here and across the Lakes, is slips, trips and navigation errors, and the real trap is the broad, featureless summit plateau in cloud. We don’t publish a per-fell death count, because no verified one exists and a number wouldn’t keep you safe anyway. What will: knowing what actually goes wrong, and the walkers’ route from Swirls if the edges aren’t your day. More fells will get the same treatment. Read the answer →
MINOR

Measured: how much colder the summit really is on a July afternoon

The bad-weather guide used to assert that summits are far colder than valleys even in summer. Now it shows you: paired same-hour observations at two Met Office stations 584 m apart, across ten Julys. The median gap is 6°C, and the median 21 mph summit wind takes a 10°C afternoon down to a felt 7°C — so the apparent drop from valley to summit is about nine degrees. Not arctic; just a different day from the one you set off in, which is exactly how summer hypothermia happens. Deliberately conservative (the ‘valley’ station is itself upland), honestly caveated, and downloadable as data. See the measured gap →
MAJOR

New: how many other Lakeland lists have you secretly climbed?

The Lakeland lists overlap far more than most walkers realise — the famous rounds are drawn over the same mountains, so a great many summits count more than once. Finish the 214 Wainwrights and, without ever meaning to, you’ll already have stood on 91% of the Fellrangers, 42% of the Synges and more than 200 Birketts. Now you can find out exactly where you stand: upload your GPX tracks and the new credit calculator tells you how many fells on each list you’ve secretly already done. It runs entirely in your browser — your tracks never leave your device, and nothing is stored. Worked out from the summits your tracks actually cross and each fell’s list membership from the Database of British and Irish Hills; only ever as complete as the tracks you feed it. Open the credit calculator →
MAJOR

New: paths, access and barriers on the quieter fells

The famous fells have paths you can’t miss; the quiet ones often have none at all. So 145 of the lesser-walked tops — the outlying Birketts and off-list summits where the real question is simply “how do I get up there?” — now carry a “Terrain & access” read. For each, it says honestly whether a mapped path reaches the summit or you’re crossing open ground to get there, how far that trackless stretch runs, and how much climb and how steep the direct line is. It flags where the top sits on open-access (CRoW) land — and, the part that catches people out, where the straight line crosses ground that’s neither access land nor a right of way, so you can check before you set off. It even counts the walls, gates and stiles across the line. It’s all worked out from open elevation and map data — computed, not walked — and mapped features are never guaranteed complete, so we tell you what the data shows and no more. Honest groundwork for the fells the guidebooks skip. Path and barrier data © OpenStreetMap contributors; open-access land from Natural England. Explore the quieter fells →
MAJOR

New: which fells are hardest to stay found on in cloud

Navigation error in poor visibility is one of the commonest reasons walkers need rescuing — so every Wainwright now carries an honest read on how hard it is to stay found when the cloud comes down. Some tops make it far easier to go wrong than others: a broad, featureless plateau with no fall-line to follow (Mungrisdale Common, the Dodds); flat ground perched at the lip of a crag (Helvellyn’s edge, High Street); or a maze of rocky ground ringed by drops (Scafell Pike, Bowfell). It’s worked out from the shape of the ground itself — open elevation data — and checked against the fells everyone already knows are traps, so it lights up the right ones while the easy tops (Catbells, Latrigg) sit clear. Every fell page gains a “Navigation in cloud” band, and a new hub ranks all 214. It’s a relative, deliberately cautious guide, never a promise — and it’s summer/poor-visibility only: winter, with whiteout and hidden cornices, is harder still, and a gentle top can be the worst place of all. On the serious tops, carry a map and compass (or GPS) and know how to use them, or save it for a clear day. The site can’t navigate for you. Open the Clag Index →
MAJOR

New: can your dog, a buggy or dodgy knees manage this route?

Every walking route now carries an honest “Access & barriers” read — a plain Dog, Buggy and Knees verdict, so you can tell before you set off whether the day suits a four-legged friend, a pushchair or tired knees. It’s worked out from the gates and stiles actually mapped along each route, plus the steepest sustained descent — the stretch that punishes knees on the way down. Gates and kissing gates all the way? A dog gets the green light. A ladder or squeeze stile? An honest red. And where a stile’s type isn’t recorded we say so — amber, “a dog may need lifting” — because we only ever claim what the map shows, and mapped barriers, while good in the Lakes, are never guaranteed complete, so we say “no mapped ladder stiles”, not “none at all”. The routes page gains a “Good for:” filter for dog-friendly and kind-on-the-knees walks, and the easy & family walks can now be filtered for dogs too. Barrier data © OpenStreetMap contributors. Filter the routes →
MAJOR

New: the “summit tax” — how much colder and windier the top really is

Every fell’s conditions panel now shows the gap between the valley and the summit: the degrees you lose to height, and — the part people miss — how much colder it feels once the wind is on you. On a breezy day a pleasant valley can hide a summit that feels close to freezing, and that’s exactly where walkers get caught out checking the wrong forecast. It’s worked out for each fell from the mountain-weather model, with a proper wind-chill “feels like” figure and how hard it gusts up top. We’ve also started hand-tuning the wind exposure for the low-but-airy fells — the Catbells-type ridges whose modest height hides how blustery the top is — so the estimate isn’t fooled by altitude alone. As ever: modelled guidance, never a substitute for the mountain forecast or your own judgement. See today’s conditions →
MINOR

Daylight planner: a little more margin on the longest routes

The route “Daylight & turnaround” planner now adds a small, growing safety margin to the latest-safe-start on the biggest days — where fatigue and stops stretch a long round out — while leaving shorter walks and the shown “typical” time unchanged. We’ve also noted on the panel that the walk times are computed and cross-checked against independent estimated and recorded walking times. It only ever gives you more daylight buffer, never less. Browse the routes →
MAJOR

New: The View Report — what you can see from every Wainwright

A sourced sightline for every Wainwright: how many other summits are in view from the top, how far the horizon runs, and which coasts and countries appear on the clearest days. It is worked out from open elevation data and corrected for the curve of the Earth and the bending of light — so it is geometry, not guesswork. Every fell page gains a “What you can see from the summit” panel, and a new hub ranks all the fells by their view (the most panoramic, it turns out, is Helvellyn — not the higher Scafell Pike, which is boxed in by its neighbours). It also carries an honest “how often are the tops clear?” cloud calendar from a long-run summit weather station. After the effortless views instead? Our easy viewpoints are the low-sweat companion. Open the View Report →
MAJOR

New: daylight & turnaround planner on every route

Every walking route now works out the day’s sunrise, sunset and civil dusk for its own start point, and gives you a “latest safe start” — set off later than that and you’ll likely be finishing in the dark. It does the sums from the route’s distance and climb at your chosen pace, keeps an hour’s buffer before dusk, and leans slightly cautious on speed. A head torch and spare batteries are essential on any fell; this just helps you judge the day before you set off. Browse the routes →
MAJOR

New: can your phone really call for help from the fells?

An honest, fully-sourced guide to what phone satellite SOS can — and can’t — do for a Lake District walker. It untangles the two satellite technologies people confuse, sets out what an iPhone, Pixel or Galaxy actually does in the UK (emergency-only — you can’t casually text home), and explains why the feature is weakest exactly where accidents happen: down in the gullies and corries with no clear view of the sky. The short version: a plain 999 call is still your best lifeline. It comes with a dated capability table, a “what can my phone do?” chooser for your model, a diagram of where satellite fails, and a printable car-park checklist — and every fast-moving figure is dated and re-checked each season. Read the guide →
MAJOR

Things to do: an interactive map, three “perfect days” and a weekend

The things-to-do guide is now a page you can plan a whole day on without leaving it. Every pick sits on one interactive map that follows the plan-your-day filters, so you can browse by where you’re based. Three fully-described “perfect days” — a big-fell round, an easy day and a rainy day — plus a two-day weekend, each written end-to-end with the walk, a waterfall or a view, where to park and an honest crowd-dodging tip. A quick-scan mini-menu makes the whole page easier to skim. See things to do →
MEDIUM

More accurate parking locations

We checked every car park and layby in our data against its mapped location and corrected the ones that were off — so the “nearest parking” on each fell page now points to where you actually park. A few remote verges and laybys that simply aren’t mapped anywhere are flagged and left honest. Browse the fells →
MAJOR

New: the best things to do in the Lake District — a walker's guide

A new hub answering the huge “things to do in the Lake District” question honestly, from the outdoors, on-foot angle — including a signature section for the easy, leg-saving day, when you want a big reward for little effort. It curates and links every guide: easy walks, famous fells, waterfalls, viewpoints, lakes, family days, wet-weather walks, free days out, hidden gems and what to do around each town.
MAJOR

The viewpoints guide now owns sunset & sunrise

Our best-viewpoints guide has been rebuilt around the light: today’s approximate sunrise and sunset times for the central Lakes (worked out in your browser, no app needed), the best spots for each, and a filter to find a viewpoint by sunset, sunrise, an easy walk or a near-drive-to — retargeted to the “best views in the Lake District” people actually search for, with our own photos throughout.
MAJOR

The Lake District waterfalls guide, with photos and a comparison table

The waterfalls guide now has a photo of every one of the eight guided falls, an honest “which should I visit?” comparison table (height, walk, difficulty, dogs, step-free access and parking), “go after rain” spate guidance linked to live conditions, and a stronger water-safety section.
MEDIUM

Location maps on every place guide

Every town, village, lake, tarn and waterfall guide now has a “Where is it?” map showing where it sits in the Lake District, plus a tidier at-a-glance layout.
MAJOR

New: the Lake District Climate Report

A new, fully-sourced data report on how the climate of the Lake District fells has changed in the sixty years since Wainwright finished his Pictorial Guides — warmer, wetter and less often white. It puts dated, based numbers on each trend from the Met Office’s district records: the last decade runs about +1.38°C warmer and roughly 14% wetter than Wainwright’s, with about a third fewer air-frost days, and both of the UK’s 24-hour rainfall records were set on Lakeland fells within six years. Every figure names its baseline and its data type, ranges are shown as ranges — including where the science is genuinely uncertain — and every cause is attributed to the study that found it, with the raw data downloadable as a CSV. It’s reviewed each July when the Met Office publishes its State of the UK Climate. Read the climate report →
MAJOR

Visiting the Lakes: choose your base with a picker, a map and sample trips

The Lake District orientation guide has grown from a long read into a proper trip-planner. A new 'Find your base' picker suggests where to stay from a few quick taps, and the sixteen-base comparison table now filters and sorts -- by region, whether it's on a lake, train access, and what each base is honestly best for. An interactive map shows every base coloured by its valley, alongside the gateway towns and stations, the main lakes and four big-name fells; sample itineraries from one to seven days link straight through to the walks; and the walking section pairs a live 'best fells today' panel with a 'match the day to the walk' table -- your first fell, a family day, a famous big mountain, a bad-weather banker or a car-free outing. There's a scannable 'getting around' guide for car-free trips too. Everything still works and reads with JavaScript off. Plan your trip →
MAJOR

The lakes & waters guide, now interactive -- map, chooser, boating & swimming

Our guide to the lakes and waters has become a proper planning hub. There's now an interactive map of every lake, tarn and waterfall, and a 'Find your water' chooser that filters them by what you fancy -- a swim, a paddle, a boat trip, a walk right round, a family day or an escape from the crowds. A new boating & launches section covers who runs the cruises, what you can hire and the honest distinction that matters (the four 10 mph lakes, the non-powered lakes, and the reservoirs); and an honest wild-swimming & water-quality section makes clear where swimming is banned and links the official live sources for blue-green algae and bathing water rather than faking a forecast of its own. The comparison figures are now a sourced, downloadable dataset you're welcome to cite. Explore the waters guide →
MAJOR

New: the Lake District Mountain Rescue Data Report

The definitive, fully-sourced data report on mountain rescue in the Lake District, set in the England & Wales picture -- built to be the page people cite when they need the numbers. Every figure is dated and counted by a stated basis (published sources only, no individuals named): how call-outs have risen, the busiest teams, what call-outs involve and why, fatalities framed with care, a coverage map of all twelve teams, and an honest look at whether the unpaid volunteers get the funding they deserve -- with the April 2026 parliamentary debate to back it. It credits every team and shows how to support them, and ties the patterns back to the navigation, first-aid and beginner's guides. Current to the 2025 figures, refreshed each spring, with a downloadable dataset and embeddable charts. Read the data report →
MAJOR

New: how to start hiking in the Lake District (without spending a fortune)

A beginner's guide to getting safely onto the fells -- what to do, what to carry, and what it really costs to begin (far less than the shops would have you believe). It covers starting small on easy routes, planning a day with Naismith's Rule, where to spend and where to save on gear, reading a proper mountain forecast, walking with others while you build judgement, and stepping up to the bigger fells when you're ready. It's told through the avoidable mistakes I made myself -- the wrong shell on Helvellyn, trail runners on wet rock, a frozen drinking tube on Helm Crag -- with my own photos throughout, and no affiliate links. Read the beginner's guide →
MAJOR

New: first aid for the fells

An honest, field-tested guide to first aid on the Lakeland fells -- what to do in the window before Mountain Rescue can reach you, which on a remote summit can be well over an hour. It covers the things that actually happen up here: ankle and lower-leg injuries (the single biggest call-out), hypothermia staging, blisters, head injuries and cardiac arrest on remote ground -- with a clear 'self-evacuate or call for help' decision chart and hand-drawn diagrams. It's a holding action, not a replacement for Mountain Rescue or proper training: in an emergency, dial 999, ask for Police, then Mountain Rescue. Read the first-aid guide →
MAJOR

New: a complete field guide to Lake District navigation

A new long-form guide to navigating the Lakeland fells -- the fundamentals of map, compass, contours and grid references taught the Ordnance Survey way, alongside a first-hand, honest reckoning of GPX smartwatches versus paper maps (including the day a watch on Dollywaggon Pike nearly sent me over the edge). It covers planning and Naismith's Rule, comms and emergencies, the Lakeland danger spots worth knowing, and a verified directory of the ten Lake District Mountain Rescue teams and the areas they cover -- with hand-drawn diagrams for taking a compass bearing and for reading the key contour shapes. Read the navigation guide →
MAJOR

New: the 20 best viewpoints in the Lake District

A new guide to twenty of the finest views in the Lakes -- chosen for the reward against the effort, from five-minute roadside stops like Ashness Bridge and Surprise View to short, shapely fells like Catbells, Loughrigg and Orrest Head. Each one tells you what you actually see from the top, how to reach it (distance, climb and parking), a first-hand note and a map, and where it sits on Instagram -- ranked by how many photos are tagged at the spot itself as a location, not by hashtag. For the big-summit panoramas, every card links through to its full fell guide. See the viewpoints guide →
MINOR

A small update to our cookie policy

The site is still cookieless by default -- no analytics, no tracking, no account. The one new exception is entirely opt-in: the new viewpoints guide can show photos straight from Instagram, and because Instagram (Meta) sets its own cookies, nothing from it loads until you choose to allow it -- either through a one-line consent banner or by clicking an individual photo card. You can change or withdraw that choice at any time via 'Cookie settings' in the footer. The full detail, including what Meta receives, is in the privacy policy. Read the privacy policy →
MEDIUM

The Collections hub, upgraded -- and back in the menu

Collections has had a proper polish and rejoined the main menu. Each group now opens with a short description -- with a few recommended guidebooks for the easy walks and the scrambles -- and a new panel up top picks out the highest-scoring fell to climb today from the daily conditions. The lists grouped by town gained a quick area filter, and they now use a tighter 5 km radius, so the walks shown are genuinely on your doorstep rather than a drive away.
MINOR

Every fell now shows its own description

A behind-the-scenes fix to how each fell page is matched to its write-up. A few summits that share a name with another fell -- the two Harter Fells (Mardale and Eskdale), the two Yew Banks, Great Crag and a handful more -- could end up showing the wrong one's description. Every page now carries its own, and I removed a few duplicate write-ups that had slipped onto two pages.
MEDIUM

The lake guides, completed: seven more waters

The lake guides are now complete -- seven more waters join last week's ten, for seventeen in all. The new ones: Esthwaite Water (Beatrix Potter's lake, a private fishery with no swimming); Buttermere (the classic flat circuit and its little rock tunnel); Grasmere -- the lake in Wordsworth's vale, not to be confused with the village on its shore; Loweswater (the quiet one that drains inward, away from the sea); Rydal Water (Rydal Cave, Dora's Field and the old Coffin Route); Brothers Water (the easy Hartsop circuit at the foot of Kirkstone, and the honest truth behind its sad name); and Elter Water -- the smallest lake, the 'lake of the swans', and why you can't really walk round it. Each gives the facts, the swimming rules, the best walk, and a 'Walks by [lake]' list of every nearby route and fell with live conditions.
MEDIUM

Easier to use for everyone: accessibility improvements

I've made a broad pass to make the site work better for everyone, towards the WCAG 2.1 AA standard. Every fell's main photo now carries a written description for anyone using a screen reader; the colour contrast is stronger across the search box, links and form controls; the menus, filters and the bagging-tracker buttons are properly labelled and keyboard-friendly; and there's a 'skip to content' link with clearer page structure throughout. If you browse with a screen reader, a keyboard or larger text, it should all feel smoother now.
MEDIUM

New: the best day this week, on every fell's forecast

Every fell's weather card now does more than list the next seven days -- it scores each day for that exact summit, using the same rating behind the daily conditions, and picks out the best day to go. Each day gets a colour-coded band; tap one to open the detail (summit gust, rain, temperature, visibility and daylight), and the days further out fade as the forecast gets less certain. It stays honest about a poor week, and always points you to the MWIS and Met Office mountain forecasts before you set off.
MAJOR

New: in-depth guides to the lakes themselves

We've added full guides to the lakes themselves -- not just the towns and villages on their shores. That now covers ten: Lake Windermere, Ullswater and Derwentwater; Coniston Water (Donald Campbell and Bluebird, Swallows and Amazons, the Steam Yacht Gondola); Haweswater (the reservoir that drowned the village of Mardale); Bassenthwaite Lake (the only water actually called a 'lake'); Thirlmere (and the gentler way up Helvellyn); Ennerdale Water (the remotest lake, with no road alongside it); Wast Water (England's deepest); and Crummock Water (Scale Force and a fine swim). Each covers what makes it special -- the facts, the boats, swimming and the rules (which differ lake to lake), and honest answers to the things people ask -- and opens a 'Walks by [lake]' list of every route and fell within about five miles, with live conditions. More lakes and tarns to follow.
MEDIUM

More Collections: by area, by difficulty, scrambles & a bad-day list

The Collections section has grown. There's now a page for each of the seven Lakeland areas (the Northern Fells, the Eastern Fells and so on, with live conditions); the walks grouped by the size of the day, from Easy to Severe; a hand-picked 'Scrambles & the edges' list for those with a head for heights; and 'Fells to save for a bad day' -- the low fells that keep you below the cloud when the tops are wild. The exposure rating on the serious routes has been walked and confirmed first-hand, not just estimated.
MEDIUM

Five big mountain rounds added

Five long days from my own GPS tracks join the routes library: the Kentmere Horseshoe, the full Coniston Horseshoe (all seven tops), the Ullscarf, Eagle Crag & Sergeant's Crag round from Stonethwaite, the Fusedale Circuit above Howtown, and the far-eastern Longsleddale round. Each carries honest distance, ascent, pacing and difficulty -- proper half- to full-day rounds, not easy strolls.
MEDIUM

Three more Borrowdale guides: Seatoller, Stonethwaite & Rosthwaite

The heart of Borrowdale gets three village guides: Seatoller at the foot of Honister Pass, Stonethwaite in its quiet side-valley, and Rosthwaite, the walkers' hub of the upper dale. Each has the usual -- getting there and the 78 bus, parking, where to stay and eat, and the walks and fells right from the door.
MINOR

More of my own photos

A few more fells now carry my own pictures instead of borrowed ones -- Bleaberry Fell, High Tove and Fleetwith Pike, plus a new shot of Derwentwater. I'm slowly replacing stock and Wikimedia images with my own across the site.
MAJOR

New: Collections — curated, conditions-aware walk lists

There's a new Collections section that pulls the site's walks together into curated, data-backed lists -- and it leads with the one thing no other Lake District site can: which of them are good to climb today. There's a 'Walks from [town]' page for every place I cover (every nearby route and fell within about five miles, ranked, with live conditions), a 'Lake District fells you can reach by bus' list for car-free days, the easy & family walks, and more to come -- all gathered on the new Collections page in the menu. Every fell and route page now also shows the collections it belongs to, so it's easier to find your way around the site. The lists are generated straight from the live data, so they keep themselves up to date.
MEDIUM

New guides: Portinscale & Grange-in-Borrowdale

Two more village guides join the Places section, both near Keswick. Portinscale is the quiet Derwentwater-shore village a mile from town -- Lingholm and Beatrix Potter's walled garden, the marinas for getting on the lake, and the Catbells path on the doorstep. Grange-in-Borrowdale is the tiny, postcard village by the famous double packhorse bridge in the heart of Borrowdale -- Castle Crag (the lowest Wainwright), the Bowder Stone and swimming in the River Derwent. Each carries the usual honest steer on getting there, parking and the walks from the door.
MINOR

More easy walks & low-level routes

I've added a batch of new low-level walks. Five more easy & family walks -- the Grasmere lake circuit, Blea Tarn in Little Langdale, Slater Bridge & Cathedral Cave, the Bowder Stone and the Loweswater circuit -- plus five longer low-level routes for a half-day without the big climbs: Castlerigg Stone Circle, Watendlath and its packhorse bridge, Ashness Bridge & the Surprise View, the Crummock Water shore and the Wray Castle circuit. I've also swapped in my own photographs on several routes and fells in place of borrowed ones.
MEDIUM

New: Easy & family walks

There's a new Easy & family walks section -- a home for the gentler side of the Lakes: low-level lakeshores, waterfalls, tarns and easy viewpoints, all under 500 m of climb. I've seeded it with fifty of the best easy walks across the district, each with honest suitability flags -- whether it's genuinely pushchair-friendly, good for young children, has a standout view, and how it is underfoot -- so families can see what they're taking on before they set off. You can filter the list by all of those, plus by feature (lake, waterfall, tarn, viewpoint or forest) and distance. The first ten now have full guides with maps, GPX and live conditions -- Tarn Hows, the Buttermere lake circuit, Aira Force & Gowbarrow, Orrest Head, Stock Ghyll Force, Latrigg, Friar's Crag, Hallin Fell, Loughrigg Terrace and Elterwater -- and the rest are on the way. The main Routes page now keeps to the proper fell days, with Easy & family walks linked from the top of it.
MAJOR

New: a 16-day fell-weather Outlook

There's a new Outlook page that looks ahead about a fortnight, to answer the question most trips start with: 'I can get away some weekend soon -- which looks best for the fells?' It scores each of the next couple of weeks across all seven Lakeland regions the same way as the live Conditions page (clear summits, wind, rain and visibility) and lays them out as a colour-coded, day-by-day grid; click any day to compare the regions. There's also a window finder: tell it your dates and whether you want a day, a weekend or a week, and it ranks the best upcoming windows for you. The first few days are the most reliable and it gets vaguer further out, so treat it as a planning steer -- always check the Met Office mountain forecast and MWIS before you head up. Find it as 'Outlook' in the menu, next to Conditions.
MINOR

New route: Skiddaw via Ullock Pike & Dodd

A new route guide for one of the finest ways up Skiddaw -- a loop from the Dodd Wood forest car park up the clean, airy ridge over Ullock Pike and Longside Edge, the loose scree pull to Skiddaw's summit and the view out to the Solway Firth, then back over Carl Side to the little wooded top of Dodd. As ever it's built from a walk I've done myself: five Wainwrights with the five-axis difficulty profile, elevation profile and fast/steady pacing, a stage-by-stage description, two escape routes, and honest notes on the two navigation traps -- don't bear left too early or you'll miss Skiddaw's summit, and take the careful, GPS-checked line off Carl Side down to Dodd. GPX to download, cross-linked to every summit and the live conditions.
MINOR

New route: the Coledale Round

There's a new route guide for the Coledale Round -- one of the great north-western horseshoes from Braithwaite, taking in Grisedale Pike, Hopegill Head, Crag Hill, Sail, Outerside and Barrow. Like the others it's built from a walk I've actually done: the page carries the five-axis difficulty profile, an elevation profile and fast/steady pacing, a stage-by-stage description, three escape routes for when the weather turns, and honest notes on the airy bits -- the steep, hands-on pull up Grisedale Pike, the sharp drop to keep left of along Hobcarton Crag, and the descent off Sail to avoid. The GPX is there to download, and it's cross-linked to all six Wainwrights and the live conditions.
MINOR

Recent walks -- with photos -- on the About page

The About page now shows a handful of my most recent walks: the ones I've taken photos on, each with a small gallery of my own pictures and a link out to the full activity on Strava. It's a simple, honest way to show I'm actually out on these fells in all weathers, not just writing about them from a desk -- and it refreshes as I add new walks. It's built to stay light: the photos are kept small and only load as you scroll down to them.
MINOR

A friendlier 'page not found'

If you ever land on a broken or mistyped link, you'll now get a proper Lake-District-themed 'page not found' page rather than a bare server error -- with a clear signpost back to the fells, routes, places and today's conditions, and a nudge to let me know if a page you were expecting really should be there.
MEDIUM

New: a complete Glenridding visitor guide

There's a new in-depth guide to Glenridding -- the little village on Ullswater that's the classic base for Helvellyn -- joining the Places section alongside Keswick, Ambleside, Grasmere and the others. It leads with what people actually search for: parking (which car park, how to pay, where to leave the car for Helvellyn or Glenridding Dodd, and the fallbacks when the main one's full), then the easiest and the most dramatic ways up Helvellyn, Glenridding Dodd and the high fells, Ullswater and the steamers, Aira Force and the Ullswater Way, where to stay and eat, and the honest story of the 2015 floods. It's cross-linked throughout to our fell pages, the Striding Edge route and live conditions.
MINOR

The conditions page now works first thing in the morning

The 'Best fells today' ranking used to show 'not available yet' early in the morning, before that day's scores had finished calculating -- annoying if you were planning a walk over breakfast. It now falls back to the freshest scores it has (the next day's are ready the evening before), so the page stays useful around the clock, and the daily scoring runs earlier too. The date the scores are for is always shown.
MINOR

Even faster -- and lighter on repeat visits

A round of speed work on top of the recent homepage changes: the site's styles, scripts and images are now compressed and minified, and your browser is told it can safely cache them, so repeat visits and moving between pages are quicker and use less data. We also tidied up a couple of small text-contrast spots for better readability.
MINOR

New Contact and Privacy pages, and a tidier footer

There's now a proper Contact page -- the quickest way to flag a wrong parking spot or a broken link is still the report form, with email and LinkedIn as alternatives -- and a standalone Privacy page that spells out the site's no-cookies, no-tracking stance in plain English. Every page's footer is now consistent, with Privacy and Contact links added alongside the rest.
MINOR

Behind the scenes: the conditions data, made readable by AI tools

An experimental, behind-the-scenes step: the daily fell-conditions feed is now described in a standard machine-readable format, so AI assistants and agents can find and use it ("which Lake District fell is best to walk today?"). Nothing changes for visitors -- it's an early, optional bet as these AI-discovery standards emerge, and we'll keep it only if it proves worthwhile.
MEDIUM

Faster pages that work even before the scripts load

The homepage fell list and the Conditions ranking now arrive as part of the page itself, rather than being drawn by JavaScript after the page loads. In practice the list you came for shows up straight away -- noticeably quicker on a phone or a slow signal -- and the whole thing still works even if scripts are blocked or fail. Everything you could do before still works once the page is interactive: search, sort, the Wainwright/Outlying filter and your progress ticks on the homepage; the Today/Tomorrow toggle, the region, length and bus filters, 'near me' and the map on the Conditions page. Same pages, just faster and more robust.
MINOR

Bylines on the fells and routes I've walked myself

Where I've actually been up a fell or written up a route from the ground, the page now carries a small 'Written and walked by Lee McCoy' line with the date I last reviewed it -- an honest marker of first-hand experience. It only appears where it's earned: a fell shows it if I've left personal notes or logged a walk up it on Strava, and a route shows it once it's had a full field-checked write-up. Pages built from data and research alone don't make that claim.
MINOR

Sharper previews when you share a page, and clearer photo credits

Share a page from the site -- on X, Facebook or a messaging app -- and it now shows a proper preview card with the fell or place photo, the title and a short description, instead of a bare link. Alongside that, every page photo now carries clear, machine-readable credit: my own photos are marked as mine, and the Wikimedia photos name the photographer and their Creative Commons licence, linking back to the original. Nothing changes on the page itself -- it's about how the site looks when it's shared, and making sure every photographer is properly credited.
MINOR

Accurate Mountain Rescue links

The 'Local Mountain Rescue' links on Helvellyn, Fairfield and St Sunday Crag now point straight to Patterdale Mountain Rescue Team -- the team that actually covers those fells -- rather than the national Mountain Rescue body, matching the other two dozen fells in the Patterdale area. The Keswick Mountain Rescue links have also been tidied to a single consistent address.
MINOR

Behind the scenes: richer information for search engines

A round of under-the-hood work helps search engines understand the site properly: each fell is described as a mountain (tied to its Wikipedia and Wikidata entries), each route as a hiking trail with its distance, climb and start point, each guide as an article with its author, and the site itself as a named publication. None of this changes what you see -- it just helps the right page turn up when you search, and lays the groundwork for richer search results over time.
MAJOR

New: a Lake District events & festivals guide

There's a whole new Events section -- an honest, month-by-month guide to what's on across the Lakes: traditional Lakeland sports days and agricultural shows, music, food and film festivals, and the gloriously odd local traditions (gurning at the Egremont Crab Fair, the World's Biggest Liar, Penrith's torchlit Winter Droving). Every event is tagged with its nearest town (linked to our full guide), whether it's indoor or outdoor, and whether it's family-friendly, with a 'coming up' list that rolls forward by date. The flagship events -- Ambleside and Grasmere sports, the Hawkshead and Keswick shows, and the world-renowned Kendal Mountain Festival -- get their own pages with how to get there, what's nearby and how to plan a day around them. We only show a firm date once it's confirmed with the organiser; where one isn't out yet we say 'usually [month]' and link the official site so you can check. You'll find 'Events' in the top menu, and every town guide now links to the events near it. We'll keep adding events over time.
MAJOR

New: in-depth Lake District town & village guides

There's a whole new Places section -- honest, in-depth visitor guides to the Lakes' main bases, tied together by a Lake District orientation hub. The hub answers the big planning questions: where it is and how to get here, the difference between Cumbria and the Lake District, how the area is laid out (north, east, west and south), how to choose your base, the lakes themselves, how many days you need, and what it costs. From there it links to full guides for Keswick, Windermere, Bowness-on-Windermere, Ambleside and Grasmere. Each guide covers where to stay, what to do, food and drink, getting there and parking, and -- our speciality -- the best walks and fells straight from the door, cross-linked to our fell pages, routes and live conditions, with a clear FAQ on every page. They lead with first-hand local knowledge rather than rehashed tourist-board copy. You'll now find 'Places' in the top menu.
MINOR

Faster, sharper photos on the location pages

The location guides now serve modern WebP images (with a JPEG fallback for older browsers), cutting the main photo's file size by a third to a half -- the Windermere header image, for instance, dropped from about 220KB to 80KB. The lead photo also loads with high priority and a reserved size, so it appears quickly and the text no longer jumps around while the page loads.
MEDIUM

Catbells, Maiden Moor & High Spy: full walk-through

The Catbells-Maiden Moor-High Spy round is now a field-checked guide, the third route to get the full human pass after Fairfield and Langdale. Re-ingested from an adjusted GPX, it runs as a loop from Hawes End: up the Catbells ridge over Skelgill Bank (with the well-known scrambly steps), on over the easily-missed top of Maiden Moor to High Spy, and back the same way keeping right off High Spy to avoid re-climbing Maiden Moor. Five stages of hand-written navigation notes and the spots people go wrong, a confirmed bail-out from Catbells/Hause Gate (east to Derwentwater is the gentler, more sheltered way down; west to Little Town is shorter but more exposed), a turn-back-at-Catbells short option, and the High Spy North Top detour for top-baggers. Live conditions score the three Wainwrights. As ever, it's a guide -- check the forecast before you go.
MINOR

Fixed 22 fells filed under the wrong Wainwright book

Twenty-two Wainwrights were showing under the wrong Wainwright 'book' (region) -- which affected the area grouping, the homepage search filter and, on the new Maps & guidebooks panel, the recommended Pictorial Guide volume. For example Cat Bells now correctly sits in the North Western Fells (Book 6), Place Fell in the Far Eastern Fells (Book 2) and Loughrigg Fell in the Central Fells (Book 3). The seven books now hold exactly the right number of fells, and a build-time check will stop the same drift creeping back in if the underlying hill data is ever re-imported.
MINOR

Fix: overlapping panels on the desktop homepage

On wider screens the right-hand column (Best fells today, your progress, What's new) could squash and overlap itself when its contents were taller than the screen, clipping a card or two. The column now keeps each card at its natural height and scrolls within itself instead, so nothing overlaps.
MEDIUM

Maps & guidebooks on every fell and route

Each fell and route page now has a small 'Maps & guidebooks' section near the bottom, suggesting the right OS Explorer sheet for that fell and the guidebooks that actually cover it -- the correct Wainwright Pictorial Guide volume for the area, plus the Birkett, Outlying, Synge or Nuttall books where the fell is on those lists, and the occasional fell-specific title. It's driven by a hand-curated list matched to each fell by region, list membership and location, so adding a book once makes it appear everywhere it's relevant. Routes gather the union across the summits they cross, so a round spanning two areas shows both volumes and both OS sheets. The Amazon links are affiliate links (we earn from qualifying purchases at no extra cost to you); there's a short note in each section and a fuller explanation on the Data sources page. No Amazon cover images or live prices -- just text links.
MINOR

Homepage intro brought up to date

The welcome blurb on the homepage now reflects everything the site does, not just the Birketts-alongside-Wainwrights idea (which still leads, since it's the whole point). It now also points to today's climbing verdicts, the hand-mapped routes with GPX, Mountain Rescue hazard notes, FAQs, progress tracking, and my own notes and photos -- with quick links through to Best fells today and the Routes hub for anyone arriving for the first time.
MEDIUM

Colour-blind-friendly maps and difficulty colours

The routes map now loads in a single neutral blue rather than a green-to-red difficulty ramp, so it reads cleanly for the roughly 1 in 12 men with red-green colour blindness. You can still colour the map by difficulty or by today's conditions from the menu beside it -- the difficulty ramp has been swapped to a colour-blind-safe blue-to-orange scale (no red-next-to-green), and the legend changes to match whatever colouring you pick. Every coloured element also spells out its meaning in words: each route's map popup names its difficulty, the cards keep their text labels, and the per-route difficulty chips show the band name as well as the tint. The conditions bands got a small tweak too, nudging Marginal from amber towards a more distinct orange. Colour is never the only signal anywhere.
MEDIUM

Langdale Pikes Round: full walk-through, clockwise

The Langdale Pikes Round is now written up as a field-checked guide, the second route to get the full human pass after Fairfield. It runs clockwise from New Dungeon Ghyll up Stickle Ghyll to Sergeant Man and High Raise, then back over Thunacar Knott, Pavey Ark, Harrison Stickle, Pike of Stickle, Loft Crag and Thorn Crag before the pitched descent to Stickle Barn -- nine stages, each with hand-written navigation notes and the spots where people go wrong. The safety notes are explicit: Jack's Rake is flagged as a serious scramble to avoid on the walkers' line, the sheer north edge of Pavey Ark and the short hands-on scramble onto Pike of Stickle are called out, and there's a shorter variant that skips the out-and-back to Sergeant Man and High Raise to save about an hour. As ever, it's a guide -- check the mountain forecast before you go.
MEDIUM

Live conditions on the routes

Every route page now shows a ‘Conditions on this route’ panel: it takes today’s (and tomorrow’s) summit scores for the fells on the round and reports the route on its worst summit — the band and score, what’s holding it back, and the windiest top — so you can judge ‘should I do this one today?’ at a glance. Where a route also bags Birkett or Outlying tops, it says how many summits are covered (only the Wainwrights are scored), and it’s modelled guidance for the tops, not the valley. The Routes page gains a sort (gentlest first, by length, climb, summits or name), a combined map of every route colour-coded by difficulty (with an optional ‘today’s conditions’ colouring), and a ‘conditions today’ badge on each route. As ever, it’s a guide — check the mountain forecast before you go.
MEDIUM

Navigation in the header of every page

Every page now has a navigation bar in the header — Fells, Routes, Conditions and About — so you can move around the site without scrolling to the footer (the ⛰️ logo still takes you Home). On a phone it tucks into a tidy ☰ menu. The footer links are unchanged.
MEDIUM

Fairfield Horseshoe: the first full walk-through

The Fairfield Horseshoe route is now the worked example for the new route guides — written up clockwise (Nab Scar first) with a stage-by-stage walk-through, the route-finding and the spots that catch people out (the featureless Fairfield plateau in mist; the deep bog above Low Brock Crags), confirmed escape routes down to Grasmere, Stone Arthur and Seat Sandal, and easier/harder variations with the reasoning for going clockwise. The other routes will follow this standard over time.
MINOR

Fix: odd characters in fell notes

Apostrophes and dashes typed into a fell's notes could occasionally show up as a stray ‘—’ symbol, depending on how the text editor saved the file. The site now repairs that automatically when it builds the pages, so punctuation always displays correctly.
MEDIUM

Roomier homepage on desktop + faster load

On wider screens the homepage now puts the fell explorer front and centre with Best Fells, your progress and the news tucked into a tidy panel of cards down the right-hand side that stays in view as you scroll; on phones and tablets it stays as a single column. The cards now read as a neat set rather than full-width stripes. The homepage ‘Best fells’ box is leaner too — the top three picks with the day toggle, and the full ranked list with its map now lives on the Conditions page (linked from the box). With that map off the front page, the homepage loads noticeably quicker. Same colours and content — just calmer and easier to scan.
MEDIUM

Homepage leads with the fell explorer

The homepage now puts the search box and fell list right at the top, with the search bar staying put as you scroll — so your results never get separated from the search. Start typing (or pick a filter) and a ‘Showing N of 330 fells’ line appears with a Clear button, and the Best Fells, progress and news panels tuck out of the way so the matching fells fill the screen; clear the search and they’re back. Those panels now live together in one section just below the explorer. Same look and content — just arranged so finding a fell is the first thing you can do.
MAJOR

Progress tracker: per-list bars, map of your fells & milestones

The homepage now has a collapsible ‘Your progress’ panel: a bar for each list (Wainwrights and Birketts first, then Outlying, with the in-area lists behind a ‘show all’ — and only the full lists can ever read ‘complete’, honestly). Fells you’ve bagged now show as a green ring on every map, and a new ‘Your fells’ overview map plots all 599 across the Lakes so you can see your progress spatially. Pass a round number — 100 Wainwrights, 300 Birketts, a whole region like the Northern fells — and you get a gentle congratulations, with the milestones you’ve earned kept as badges and your next target shown alongside. There’s also a ‘What’s new’ summary on the homepage. Everything stays private on your device and adds no new network requests.
MEDIUM

Richer route pages: difficulty profile, pacing & stages

Every route page now goes well beyond a single ‘Moderate’ label. A new Difficulty profile rates the walk on five separate axes — length, steepness, terrain underfoot, navigation and exposure — each as Easy / Moderate / Hard / Severe with a one-line reason, so a beginner and an old hand can both read it correctly. Length and steepness are measured straight from the GPX; terrain, navigation and exposure start as a ‘desk’ estimate from maps and guidebooks (clearly tagged ‘not field-verified’) and firm up as I walk and check each route. There's also a pacing table giving a fast-to-steady time to each summit in turn, the elevation profile now marks each top (and any checked escape route), a stage-by-stage breakdown of the walk, an Escape routes section, and easier/harder variations. Fairfield Horseshoe is the worked example; the rest follow as I get round them.
MEDIUM

Today's verdict on every Wainwright page

Each Wainwright's page now carries a conditions verdict card just below the map — its band and score for today (and tomorrow), the one-line headline, what's holding it back, and the estimated summit wind — drawn from the same daily scoring as the Best Fells page. The ‘Birketts near…’ list has moved further down the page, just above ‘Other fells in this region’.
MAJOR

Best Fells v2: a full ranked Conditions page

A new Conditions page ranks all 214 Wainwrights by today's and tomorrow's walking conditions, with a map and filters — by region, reachable by bus, walk length, ‘near me’, and hiding fells you've already bagged. Wind is now shown honestly as both the modelled valley gust and an estimated summit gust (exposed tops feel windier than the valley), and the ‘boggy underfoot’ rating now responds to the past week's rain — a dry spell firms up the bogs, a wet day sinks them. Linked from the homepage ‘Best fells’ panel.
MAJOR

Best fells today & tomorrow

The homepage now opens with a daily pick of the best Wainwrights to climb today and tomorrow, scored from the Met Office mountain-weather model — clear summits, wind, rain, visibility, comfort and how boggy it'll be underfoot. Each is given an honest verdict (Cracking / Decent / Marginal / Save it) with a one-line reason, plotted on a map, and tomorrow even suggests whether morning or afternoon looks better. It's modelled guidance, not a forecast in its own right — always check the mountain forecast and use your own judgement before heading up.
MINOR

Routes & site polish

A round of tidying: route pages now show the photo and key facts side by side with the walk description flowing underneath, list which lists each summit belongs to (Wainwright, Birkett, Synge…), and only flag hazard notes for fells that actually have a hazard page. The Routes index is cleaner, the Fells page explains the lists before the hazard list (now trimmed to the genuinely serious High/Extreme fells), and every page now has the same footer with quick links to everything.
MAJOR

Dedicated route pages with maps, elevation profiles and GPX

Each walking route now has its own page — an interactive map of the line, an elevation profile, the full walk description, every summit it bags (with links), parking and buses for the start, safety notes, and a GPX download. There's a new Routes hub listing them all (linked from the footer), and each fell page's 'Routes over…' section now links straight to the full guide.
MEDIUM

Mark a fell as bagged from its own page

Every fell page now has a ‘Mark as bagged’ button near the top, so you can tick off a fell while you're reading about it — no need to go back to the homepage list. It uses the same private, on-device record as the homepage, so a fell ticked in either place shows as bagged in both.
MEDIUM

‘From the fells’ — daily conditions & news

The homepage now has a ‘From the fells’ panel beside the welcome text, bringing together the things worth knowing before you head out: safety and weather warnings first, then access and path news (closures, parking, buses), then lighter fell news. Each item is a short summary linking to the official source — always check live conditions before you set off.
MAJOR

Track the fells you've bagged

The homepage list now lets you tick off the fells you've climbed — tap the ✓ next to any fell and it's remembered. A new strip under the search bar shows how many you've bagged, including your Wainwright and Birkett tallies. Your progress is saved privately in your own browser (nothing is sent anywhere and there's no account), and you can Export it to a file to back it up or move it to another device — and Import it back. This is the first step of a bigger progress-tracker: per-list progress bars, your ticks shown on the maps, and milestone badges are coming next.
MEDIUM

Jump-to-a-fell search on every fell page

Every individual fell page now has a search box near the top: start typing and a list of matching fells appears, so you can jump straight to any other fell without going back to the homepage. It works by name (try a few letters), shows each fell's height and area, and is fully keyboard- and screen-reader-friendly.
MEDIUM

Suggested walking routes

Fell pages are starting to carry suggested walking routes you can follow and download as a GPX, with the distance, total climb and every summit each route bags. Each is marked ‘planned’ (a line I've drawn but not yet walked) or ‘revised’ (one I've walked and tweaked from first-hand experience, with a note on what I changed and why). Rolling out fell by fell.
MEDIUM

New ‘Data sources’ page

A new Data sources page, linked from the footer, sets out where everything on the site comes from — the mapping, hill lists, weather, transport, parking and toilets, photos, my Strava hikes, the FAQs and the Mountain Rescue hazard information — with credits and licences for each.
MEDIUM

FAQs on fell pages

Fell pages are starting to gain a Frequently Asked Questions section — the real questions people ask about each fell (how hard is it, the easiest route, how long it takes, what to wear), answered clearly and backed by trusted sources. Rolling out across the fells over time.
MEDIUM

Built to be read by AI assistants

A significant behind-the-scenes refactor: every part of a fell page — hazards, my hikes, the weather and the new FAQs — is now written into the page itself rather than loaded by your browser afterwards. That makes the information much easier for search engines and AI assistants (such as Google’s AI overviews, ChatGPT and Claude) to read and quote accurately.
MAJOR

New ‘Fells’ guide page

A new Fells page explains what a fell actually is and breaks down all the Lakeland lists — Wainwrights, Outlying Fells, Birketts, Fellrangers, Synges, Nuttalls, Marilyns and HuMPs — each with its book, author and every fell on it that's covered here. The fell breadcrumb link now points to this page.
MINOR

Nearby toilets at trailheads

Parking spots now show nearby public toilets (within 2km), with distance, free/paid status, accessibility, and RADAR key flags where known. Data from toiletmap.org.uk.
MEDIUM

Photos on fell pages

Many fell pages now open with a photo of the fell — from Wikimedia Commons (with credit), or my own pictures where I have them. On wider screens the photo sits beside the summary; on phones it stacks above the text. More of my own photos going in over time.
MEDIUM

Mountain Rescue hazard information

Fell pages now carry a hazard rating and a Hazard & Incident Information section — danger spots, common causes and honest advice — compiled from published Mountain Rescue reports. Rolling out the most accident-prone fells first, with more added each week.
MAJOR

A guide page for every fell

Around 600 individual, search-engine-friendly pages — every Wainwright, Outlying Fell and Birkett — plus a full sitemap so they're easy to find.
MEDIUM

Renamed to Lake District Fell Bagger

A clearer name for what the site does (it was previously Birkett Bagger).
MEDIUM

Key Information & personal notes

Each fell now opens with a plain-English summary, plus my own notes where I've been up there.
MEDIUM

Other fells in this region

Every fell page now links to the neighbouring Wainwrights for easy trip planning.
MEDIUM

About page

A bit about the project and why it exists.
MINOR

Hazard chip & quick links

A colour-coded hazard tag below each fell name; the fell list now links straight to each fell's page; the parking section is now labelled Potential parking.
MINOR

Footer & housekeeping

Added a Terms, Conditions & Cookies page, a Report a Problem link, a last-updated date, a changelog and a site icon (favicon).
MEDIUM

Strava hikes on every fell

Each fell page shows my own walks over that summit — the route drawn on the map, with distance, ascent, time, pace and photos.
MEDIUM

Automatic updates

New hikes sync in automatically each week, and site changes publish themselves — so the site stays current without manual effort.
MAJOR

Site launched

For every Wainwright and Outlying Fell, the Birketts you can bag on the same walk — with free topo maps, suggested parking, bus routes from Penrith, Ambleside and Windermere, and a live 7-day summit weather forecast.
MEDIUM

Accurate hill data

Fell lists built from the authoritative Database of British and Irish Hills — 214 Wainwrights, 116 Outlying Fells and 541 Birketts.

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