What changed in September 2026

This page used to put every entry ever written onto one address: 235 of them, and growing by about fifty a month. It is now a month at a time, with this page listing the months and the latest handful. Each month has its own address you can link to and each entry its own anchor. Four entries marked as the largest changes we have made were being labelled the smallest, which is fixed. Separately, the bus pages were laid out wider than a phone screen and scrolled sideways, cutting off the right of every line; they now fit, and each route's strip map scrolls on its own instead of dragging the page with it. Lake District buses →

The twenty car park pages have been drawing their whole article in a narrow column on a desktop screen, with most of the window left empty, and scrolling sideways on a phone because one what3words address would not wrap. Both are fixed. The charts read properly in dark mode too: the busiest-hour bar had been almost exactly the colour of the background behind it, so the page's headline finding was the one bar you could not see. A new check refuses the stylesheet rule that caused all of this, and it is shown refusing the real one before it is believed. Glenridding car park →

Every route on the buses page carries a small map of its own line, labelled by the towns and villages it runs through rather than by bus stop names, and says how many of our walks start within 500 metres of a stop on it. Eighty-eight of our 185 walks do, including 22 of the 29 we call easy enough for families. Two routes run only at weekends until the first of November, and the pages say how many walks lose their bus when they stop. On a route's own page that line map now shows the buses reporting a position, each drawn at the stop it is nearest to. It shows how far along a bus is, not where it is on the road, and it never predicts an arrival. Lake District buses →

A last bus time is only published here once somebody has checked it against the operator's own timetable. Four stops turned out to have been checked instead against another website's rendering of the same data feed this site already reads, which cannot confirm anything the feed got wrong. Two of the four had also been checked properly and are unchanged. The other two lose their sign-off, and the one of those with a page now shows the service rather than a time until it is checked again. Forty-six other stops keep their times, which were checked against the printed timetable all along. Bus times →

The bus section grows from one route to eight: the 77 round Honister and Buttermere, the 508 to Penrith, the 516 into Langdale, the 509, the 505, the 554 and the UB1 join the 555, so most fells within a kilometre of a stop now link to that stop's page. A stop served by several routes has one page carrying them all. The 77 and the UB1 run at weekends until 1 November, and every page they touch says so with the dates from the timetable; out of season their pages are not offered to search engines. Only stop pages with a checked last bus are offered for indexing. The hub's stop list names each stop by village and side of the road, and the bus pages gain the site's header. Lake District buses →

The bus section joins the site's menu, and a fell page whose nearest stop has its own page now links to it. On the 555's route page the question comes first: first and last bus by day type, each way, then the stops walkers use with what starts there, then which other services share a stop and the fells they reach, then the live map and the dates that differ. Each stop page adds 'Alight here for', the fells whose nearest stop it is, from our own measurement of every fell against every stop, with the distance as the crow flies. Six news items, each read at its source. The parking map's deep links from place pages no longer create a separate address per place. The 555 bus →

Twenty of the National Park Authority's car parks now have a page of their own, from the Authority's own ticket data released under Freedom of Information: when the day's tickets are bought, hour by hour, and how the year rises and falls, month by month. Each page adds the price where the operator publishes one, EV charging checked against the operator, the toilets and cafes nearby, and the bus that stops there. It never says whether a car park is full; it says when the people before you arrived. Every figure on every page is checked against the source data before the site is published. Lake District car parks →

Every 555 stop page now opens with the answer: the next scheduled bus from this stop, today, by the Lake District clock, with the minutes to it; the last bus of the day where it has been checked against the operator's timetable; and, when the buses are reporting, how far away the nearest one is. The last bus was being withheld on stops that had been checked per direction, so more of them now print it. Each page names the direction it serves and links the stop over the road for the other way. Today's timetable is marked, and the final departure in each list is underlined. Titles now say the stop and the direction, so no two pages share one. Armboth turn, towards Keswick →

On the collection pages, a portrait photograph no longer stretches its card open: every picture sits in the same 16:9 frame whatever shape the original was. Ravenglass, Elterwater, Threlkeld and Troutbeck join the published village pages, each with its parking, its bus, and the walks that start there. Good in poor weather →

The collection cards get their photographs back: the picture box has a fixed 16:9 frame that keeps the skyline, so a portrait photo no longer collapses to a sliver and a lazy load shifts nothing. Where we have today's conditions for a walk, the one-line reading sits over the picture rather than under the badges, so a poor-weather collection looks like the weather it is for. The filters on every collection page now hide what they exclude, which they had not since the card was rebuilt, and a filter that empties the page says why. The band and difficulty pills use the site's own colours. Summaries run to four lines, and the map sits below the walks. Good in poor weather →

The collection pages are one card again: walks by difficulty reads as a list under band headings that stay on screen, each with a rail to narrow the band by distance and suitability. The 68 walks-from-town and walks-by-water pages join the same card system, with a dial for how far from town you will go, and the map sits below the walks rather than in front of them. Easy & family walks lives under Collections with the other curated lists. Thirty-two fells carry Lee's own photograph in place of a Commons picture, 46 route photographs are sharp at full width, and 14 fell pages say which station is within 2 km on foot of the start. No route page promises notes that are coming soon. Walks by difficulty →

Every bus that serves the fells now has its own pages: a hub at /buses/, a page per route with today's timetable and a map of where the buses are right now, and a page per stop with its next departures. The 555 is the pilot, 261 stops, other services following as their timetables are checked; a last bus prints only where Lee has verified it with the operator. A new feature asks whether the A66 and M6 works will stop you getting to the Lakes, every figure dated and sourced. The collections hub's By place filter offers the seven book areas, a town on a boundary under both. And 45 stage photographs on 14 routes are sharp at full width from the phone originals. Lake District buses →

The cite page, for anyone quoting a figure, now leads with the credit line and gives each figure a labelled copy box, one receipt per group, with the rescue charts drawn for both geographies. Two layout faults from the last build are put right: the maps page had lost its container and the fewest-walks page had inherited the app grid. The privacy page fills the three newsletter gaps it had marked: double opt-in is on, an unsubscribe suppresses the address, deletion is on request. Fell pages preload their display font again, so the title paints without a swap. And every script that sat inside a page is now a file, which readers will not notice. How to cite hikes.guide →

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 →

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 →

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 →

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 →

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 →

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 →

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 →

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 →

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 →

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 →

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 →

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 →

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 →

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 →

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 →

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 →

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 →

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 →